Frankenstorm: Survivors (5 page)

7

“You understand that if this turns out to be nothing, our relationship is over,” Jack Bembenek said. “No more appearances on the news to comment on weird stories.”

Ivan and Bembenek sat in the backseat of a KIEM news van being driven by Bembenek’s camera man, Leon. Ivan had told him everything on the phone, from the initial suspicions to getting Emilio into Springmeier, and everything they’d learned since about what Vendon Labs was doing in the old hospital.

Bembenek was in his late twenties, with thick black hair and a long face. He seemed unusually nervous.

“Yeah, I understand that,” Ivan said. “But it’s not nothing. You’ll see.”

“I’m not on great terms with my boss right now. I don’t need any trouble. I like this job. And this area. I’d like to stay here. If I get fired, I could end up anywhere. I don’t want to have to move to some town in Wyoming or Nebraska.”

Ivan laughed. “Jack, you’ve got nothing to worry about. This story is going to make you famous. But you’re not the only one coming.”

“What? You called someone else, too?”

“I had to. If it’s just you, me, and your cameraman, we may never be seen again. The more newspeople, the better. It’s protection.”

“Who else did you call?”

“An old friend of mine works at KGO in San Francisco. I talked him into sending someone. But it’s a four-hour drive from there, so I also called other local stations. KVIQ, KBVU, and KAEF in Arcata.”

“Jeez, that’s
everybody
.”

“But I don’t know who will show up.”

“You didn’t call the police?”

“Didn’t have to. Like I said, Sheriff Kaufman’s there and he’s pretty badly hurt from what Emilio said. They’ll have cops out there soon enough, if they don’t already.”

“I hope you’re right. We didn’t check the van out, we just got in and left. If this turns out to be nothing, some people are going to be pretty pissed about us going out after midnight in a hurricane.”

“The storm is passing.”

“
Look
at it out there!”

“It’s not as bad as it was.”

Bembenek nodded toward the driver. “Well, if it weren’t for the fact that Leon, here, owes me a lot of favors, I probably wouldn’t have managed this.”

Leon was a rotund man with long brown hair in a ponytail under his baseball cap. “I didn’t come because I owe him favors,” Leon said in a deadpan voice, glancing over his shoulder at Ivan. “I’m a rebel.”

“I don’t think you guys have to worry about getting in trouble for this,” Ivan said. “You’ll probably win an award for it.” After a moment, he added, “If we live through it.”

 

 

It occurred to Fara as she sat at her desk, listening to the sound of occasional gunfire in other parts of the building and watching Emilio doze in his chair with his feet on the desk that she had agreed to go on a date with him when this was all over. She didn’t date often because she found it to be an odious ritual. Simply calling it a date gave rise to a host of expectations and worries. She liked Emilio and probably would enjoy going out with him, but after their experience at Springmeier, she wasn’t sure she would ever be entirely comfortable with him.

She wanted to put this whole experience behind her. It was the only way she would be able to live with herself. That would be impossible, of course, once Emilio’s recording and the details of what they were doing the night of the hurricane—hunting and killing kidnapped homeless people they’d deliberately infected with a deadly virus—were made public. She was afraid that Emilio would be a vivid reminder of all of it, that every time she looked at him, her mind would flood with horrible memories and strangling guilt. She was fairly sure that Emilio would not hold it against her—that was one of the reasons she liked him so much—but
she
would. Forgiving herself felt like an impossibility.

Of course, if Ollie was right—and in the part of her mind where she kept the things she did not directly admit to herself, she knew he was—Vendon Labs was sending a team of thugs to kill them all, making the details of her social life quite irrelevant.

She heard a loud crashing sound somewhere in the building. It wasn’t the first. She’d been hearing sounds like it for a while, and they seemed to be coming from the front of the hospital. Had another tree fallen on the building? Maybe the initial crash they’d heard in front—the one that sounded more like an explosion and then went on for a while—was the cause of it. The oak tree in front of the hospital was an enormous old thing with fat branches that reached out in all directions. And the building, of course, was old. Well over a hundred years.

The door opened and Ollie stomped in. He carelessly slammed the door behind him and Emilio jerked awake and dropped his feet from the desk. Ollie approached the desk, looking at the sheriff as he passed the couch.

“How’s he doing?”

“We’re still waiting for Corcoran to come back with a painkiller,” Fara said. “For all I know, he’s left the building.”

“He’s not coming back. He’s dead.”

Fara leaned forward in her chair. “Corcoran?”

Ollie nodded. “One of the test subjects got him. Probably more than one, I’m guessing. Really tore him up. A great loss to humanity. Is the sheriff going to be okay?”

“I think he might be asleep. I hope. He could probably use a couple stitches.”

“By our count, there are three of them left,” Ollie said. “And one of them’s got a goddamned Uzi.”

“
What?
” Emilio said, standing.

Ollie went on talking, but Fara didn’t hear him. She thought about Corcoran. Done in by his own lab rats. She agreed with Ollie’s sarcastic remarks. A great loss to humanity, indeed. He was a sadistic bastard, a narcissistic drug addict. It was a well-deserved death.

But for the past year and a half, Fara had been standing by his side, working with him. Helping him. Being like him. With a deep chill in her bones, she thought she deserved to be next.

“We need to start thinking about getting the hell out of here,” Ollie said. “The storm’s not as intense as it was, I think it might be subsiding. I’ve got vans outside the fence. Now that the gate’s open, I’ll have them brought to the back. My men will be getting into them. I strongly suggest you join us.”

“You’re going to leave those test subjects here?” Emilio asked.

“Don’t worry, they’ll be taken care of. Probably soon. We need to get out of here so we aren’t taken care of, too. Get everything you need together and be ready to leave.”

“I have a car here,” Emilio said.

“So do I,” Fara said.

“Then what the hell are you doing here? Get in your cars and go. Before you wish you had but can’t.”

After Ollie left the office again, Emilio said, “I think he’s serious. You ready to go?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been ready to go for the last eight hours.” She gestured toward the door. “I’m just not sure I want to risk going out
there
to get to my car.”

 

 

Latrice was unaware of how fast she was driving. She was too lost in her own thoughts, too busy telling herself what she was going to do when she got home. She hardly decreased her speed at all as she drove around branches and splashed through large puddles.

“Gonna be some fuckin’ changes, I can tell you
that
right now. No more of this shit, drivin’ all over the goddamned country because that fuckin’ little shit’s got some tingling, like I got nothing better to do with my time and money, money
I
earned, money
I
worked for, money—”

She interrupted herself to start pounding her fist on the steering wheel. She hadn’t noticed yet how swollen it had become, couldn’t feel how much it hurt. Her whole body ached, but she’d lost track of that, too. The vibrating rage inside her head overwhelmed everything else.

Latrice would not have noticed the police car going in the opposite direction if it had not turned on its roof lights just as they passed each other. That got her attention.

She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the white car make a slow U-turn, then speed up as it pursued her. Its siren began to wail.

Latrice pressed harder on the gas pedal.

8

“Did you see that?” Ivan said as Leon turned off of Ogden Pass onto the new gravel road that led through the woods to the old mental hospital. “There was a guy with a little kid in that SUV parked back there.”

“Yeah?” Jack said. “What about it?”

“Well . . . I don’t know, maybe they broke down, or something. I don’t like the idea of a kid being here. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“What are we supposed to do, stop and tell them to go away?”

“No, but—oh, wow,” Ivan said, leaning forward in the backseat to peer through the windshield.

As Leon drove slowly around the body in the road, Ivan looked ahead at the gate. A sheriff’s department car was parked by the guardhouse, and the bent, mangled gate was standing open. It didn’t look like the storm had done that damage, it looked like someone had driven through the gate in a hurry without bothering to open it first. Leon stopped the van just outside the gate and put it in park.

Leon steered around the police car and the headlight beams shone through the open gate, revealing bodies sprawled all over the gravel parking lot.

“Shit,” Jack said. “I don’t suppose you brought a gun.”

“I was about to ask you the same question,” Ivan said.

“We may not want to go in there unarmed.”

“Hey, to be honest, I don’t want to go in there at all. But . . . we have to.”

“Don’t worry,” Leon said. He leaned over, opened the glove box, removed a snub-nose revolver and held it up so Ivan and Jack could see it clearly. “We’re covered.”

“Do you have a permit for that?” Jack asked. He didn’t appear too happy to see that Leon had a concealed weapon in one of the station’s news vans.

“No.”

“Then what the hell are you doing with it?”

Leon stared at him a moment, then said, “There’s dead people on the ground and that’s the thanks I get for being the only one with a gun?”

“That’s not the point. You could lose your job. I probably could, too, just for being in the van with you.”

“I bet those dead guys on the ground out there would say it’s the point. I’ve also got ammo. You gonna be pissed about that, too?”

“I, for one, Leon, am glad you have the gun,” Ivan said.

“Like I said. I’m a rebel.”

“You gonna drive in there,” Ivan said, “or do we have to walk the rest of the way?”

Leon put the gun back in the glove box, closed it, and put the van in gear.

As they passed the guardhouse and went through the gate, Ivan saw two black Mercedes-Benz S-Class SUVs parked end to end behind the cars parked at the rear of the hospital, blocking them.

“I don’t like the looks of that,” Ivan said.

“Looks like somebody doesn’t want anyone to drive away,” Jack said.

“I’m thinking Vendon Labs beat us here,” Ivan said, taking his phone from his pocket.

 

 

When Ollie came into the office again, he was accompanied by two of his masked men.

“The vans are being brought to the back,” he said. “These men will escort you to your cars as soon as you’re ready.”

Another rattling, rumbling crash came from somewhere in the front half of the building. Ollie’s head turned in the direction of the sound.

Emilio’s phone chirped. He took it from his pocket and answered quietly.

Fara stood at her desk with her purse and a large canvas bag on the desk in front of her. “Who’s going to take Sheriff Kaufman?”

“He’ll go in one of our vans and we’ll take him to the hospital, if we can get there. I imagine half the town is flooded. If we wait for his deputies to get here, we could be here until Tuesday. If we can’t get to the hospital, we’ll—”

“Listen up, guys,” Emilio said. He placed his phone on Fara’s desk. “Go ahead, Ivan.”

“I’m in a news van at the gate behind the hospital,” Ivan said over the phone. “There are two big black SUVs parked perpendicularly behind the cars parked out here. They’ve intentionally blocked them. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the SUVs, which makes me think they’ve gone inside. I think you’ve got company in there.”

“Shit,” Emilio said. He turned to Ollie. “You better let your men know.”

“I’ve got two men at the entrance!” Ollie said, taking Fara’s phone from his pocket. “They should know and
stop
them!”

Fara’s legs became weak and she lowered herself into her chair. She felt like she was in an elevator that was falling from the very top of the world’s tallest skyscraper. Suddenly, her lungs felt tiny and her heart felt huge.

“Hey, hey,” Emilio said, hunkering down beside the chair. “You okay? You’re not gonna pass out on me, are you?”

“They’re here,” she said, merely breathing the words. “They’re here and we’re still here. We should have left earlier. We should have risked the storm and left
hours
ago.”

“Whoa, no, we don’t know that yet.”

She looked all around her office. She was cornered in that room. There was no way out but the door.

“Son of a bitch, they’re not answering,” Ollie said, raising the phone to his ear on his third call.

“I have to get out of here now,” Fara said, standing. She slung her purse strap over her right shoulder and the strap of the canvas bag over her left shoulder, her flashlight in her left hand, and hurried around the desk.

“Wait a second, hold it,” Emilio said, quickly stepping in front of her and putting his hands on her shoulders. He nodded toward Ollie.

He was talking on the phone. “When did they get here? . . . How many? . . . Jesus Christ, why didn’t you call me?”

Fara felt muscles tightening all over her body. She could not hold still. She stepped around Emilio and went to the door.

He came after her, whispering, “Hey, hey, hey.”

She opened the door and heard what she first thought to be the wind. But it wasn’t blowing as hard as it had before and this sound was something else.

A rapidly growing scream.

Fara stepped outside the door and Emilio followed right behind her. Both of them turned to the left, toward a shimmering orange glow in the corridor.

A fire in the shape of a person was running through the darkness toward them, screaming in agony, burning arms flailing.

 

 

“What the hell happened back there?” Deputy Olivia Burkett asked as she drove along Emerald Canyon slowly.

“Long story,” Ram said. “Buncha subhuman trash. Fuckin’ drug dealers and spics and niggers.”

Burkett frowned as she looked back and forth from the road to Ram.

“You feeling okay, Ram?”

“Me? You kidding? Never been better. Hell of a night, though. Hell of a night.”

“We’re supposed to turn up here on Ogden Pass.”

“Ogden Pass is closed.”

“Supposed to be, yeah. But there’s a new road there that leads to that old hospital. That’s where the sheriff is.”

“What the hell happened, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I hope we’re not the first ones there. Some kinda trouble.”

“Fuck. More trouble.”

She turned right onto Ogden Pass.

“Hey, what’s that?” Ram said, nodding past Burkett out her window, where a dark SUV was parked beside the road on the other side. “Stop a second.”

She stopped the car.

“Shine your light over there.”

She turned on the spotlight on her door, manipulating it with a toggle so it pointed directly at the SUV.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Ram said with a grin. He opened the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Give me a second. I know this guy. Keep the light on.”

He got out of the car, ducked his head against the wind and rain, and jogged across the road to the SUV. He knocked on the window, grinning.

“Hey, Andy!” he shouted.

The window slid down slowly and Andy squinted against the rain. “Ram,” he said.

“What the hell’re you doing here, anyway? And where’d you get—” He laughed loudly. “Did you
steal
this vehicle, Andy?”

“Well, uh . . .”

“Why didn’t you just
wait
for me? I was gonna drive you home when we were done there. I’m
still
gonna drive you home. Come on, get into the patrol car.”

“I think I’ll just drive us home myself, Ram,” Andy said.

“In a stolen vehicle? You’re not gonna make me arrest you for stealin’ a car, are you, Andy?”

“Arrest me?”

“Well,
yeah
! It’s against the law, y’know!” Ram looked beyond Andy and saw Donny pressing himself into the back of the passenger seat. “Hey, Donny! How ya doin’, buddy?” He looked at Andy again, still grinning. “C’mon, get out. I got one more call to answer, then I’ll take you guys home. Just leave this thing here and it’ll be found later. The owner’ll get it back.” He laughed. “’Course, if the owner was one of the assholes in Giff’s house, he probably ain’t gonna need it anymore.” He laughed as he opened Andy’s door and stepped back so he could get out.

“Ram, I’m not sure I want to—”

Smiling as he shook his head, Ram said, “I’m not asking, Andy.” When he saw that they were going to get out, Ram turned and went back to the patrol car and knocked on Burkett’s window, then opened the door a crack. “Can you step out here for a second, Olivia?”

He stepped aside and she pushed the door all the way open. As she got out of the car, Ram took his gun from its holster, leveled it with the back of her head and fired.

The crack of the gun sounded thick and insulated in the wind and rain.

Deputy Olivia Burkett fell forward, hit the car door, then collapsed to the ground.

Ram looked across the road at Andy and Donny standing beside the SUV, gawking at him.

“C’mon, chop-chop!” Ram shouted. “Get in the car!”

He bent down and grabbed Burkett’s hair and dragged her away from the open door. He looked across the road again and saw that they were still standing there.

Ram hefted the gun in his hand and said, “Am I gonna have to come over there and get you?”

Andy put a hand on the back of Donny’s head and they started toward Ram and the patrol car.