The Burning Man (26 page)

His hands were sweaty, so he wiped the key card on his pant leg before swiping it through the lock. There was a beep and a click as the light flashed from red to green.

Kieran twisted the knob and pushed the door open.

Olivia was standing by her window, staring out at the cryptic branches and wondering for the thousandth time if Kieran had gotten her message. Suddenly, Larry entered the room, along with Mrs. Andrada and another orderly whose name she didn’t know.

“How are we today?” Mrs. Andrada asked, not even bothering to pretend that she was actually interested. Then to the orderlies, she said, “Go ahead.”

The two men flanked Olivia, each grabbing an arm. Before she could blink, Mrs. Andrada had jabbed her with a needle.

“No!” Olivia cried, twisting hopelessly in the grip of the big men. An icy gush of fear filled her belly, and then seemed to thaw and dissipate like smoke as whatever chemical she’d just been given started to take effect. The bulb in her bedside lamp flared up, flickered, and then went back to normal.

“It’s taking effect already,” Mrs. Andrada said. “Full spectrum suppression of cerebral electrokinetic activity should occur within five to ten minutes.”

She checked her watch. “But be careful on the way to the lab. Tell Doctor Lansen about electrical anomalies of any kind, no matter how minor they may seem.

“Bring the gurney.”

Olivia sagged between the two men, feeling boneless and fuzzy. She wanted to fight, to struggle, to do something—
anything
—to stop them from taking her away, but her mind felt dull and scattered.

A new, unfamiliar nurse in surgical scrubs and a paper hairnet arrived with a gurney, pushing it in through the open doorway, and the orderlies lifted Olivia like she weighed nothing at all, dumping her on it like a dropped rag doll. The new nurse started strapping Olivia down with heavy canvas straps, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

Surgery?
she wondered.
Are they going to perform some type of surgery on me?

She found herself thinking of lobotomies and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
and those thoughts should have been terrifying, but they seemed weirdly distant, like the sort of reaction she might have to an unexpected plot twist on a television show she didn’t really like.

This was a million kinds of wrong, but all she could do was stare at the bland white ceiling tiles as the nurse wheeled her out of her room. The two orderlies flanked her like a presidential guard as she rolled down the hall. She heard Annie screaming and swearing at the far end of the hallway, and her guards went running to deal with the furious girl.

“I’m
supposed to be next!” Annie was hollering. “Not that bitch, me! I’M SUPPOSED TO BE NEXT!”

There were crashes and more swearing, but then Olivia was being pushed through the airlock, and she couldn’t hear Annie anymore. Next thing she knew, she was wheeled into Doctor Lansen’s lab.

When Kieran reached the third floor, there was another electronic lock, this one marked with a letter D. He slid the pilfered card through the lock, convinced that an alarm would go off, or some kind of automatic lockdown would trap him in the stairwell.

But the lock beeped and clicked from red to green, exactly like the one down below. He cautiously pushed the door open just enough to disengage the lock and pressed his ear to the resulting crack.

No sounds.

No clue.

He had no idea what would be on the other side of that bland, white door. It might be a room full of armed guards. It could be an empty hallway.

Only one way to find out.

He eased the door open wider, wide enough to peer through. On the other side was a hallway, but it wasn’t empty. A big, burly, red-headed guy was walking away from Kieran, practically filling the hall with his massive shoulders. Reflexively, Kieran flinched back, pulling the door closed and reengaging the lock.

He swore softly to himself, struggling to slow his breathing and chill out. The guy hadn’t seen him. It wasn’t a big deal. He made himself count to ten, then swiped the card through the lock and cracked the door again.

This time, the hallway was empty, and he actually had a chance to eyeball the layout. Clean, featureless white walls. Glossy white-tile floor. White drop-ceiling with a double row of recessed fluorescent lighting. Unmarked white doors lining either side of the corridor, four per side. At the far end there was an open, doorless archway on the right hand side, and double doors on the left.

He thought he might try to find and steal a lab coat, and pretend to be a researcher or a doctor. But that thought didn’t last. Although he had no problem passing as a believable messenger, he was afraid the lab coat would just make him look more like Doogie Howser. He still had the package, though, and if confronted he could always claim to be looking for Doctor Lansen.

But he couldn’t let that happen before he found Olivia.

The corridor wasn’t going to get any more empty, so Kieran slipped through the door. He was glad he’d worn his Doc Martens, because their rubber soles were silent on the slick white tile.

The first door that he tried was locked, as was the second. The third, however, was not. He was about to peer inside when he heard footsteps at the other end of the hall.

A nurse with a black bun stepped out of the open archway and began checking some sort of chart on the wall. Then she was turning toward Kieran, head down and reviewing something on a clipboard. If she looked up, she’d see him.

He had no option.

Pushing through the unlocked door, he found himself in a spare, square room with a single bed. The bed was occupied by a soft, bloated person with a shaved head, a slack mouth, and heavy-lidded, unseeing eyes. Kieran guessed the person was female, based on the lack of facial hair on the pale, flabby cheeks, but couldn’t be sure. He took a step closer, raising a hand and waving. No response.

That’s when he noticed a dry-erase board above the bed with the name Lisa Brachlen, an elaborate “turn schedule” indicating what time the patient had been turned from back to side or side to back, and by whom. Above that, the words comatose since 4/15/94.

Kieran had never before seen a person in a coma— not in real life—and had always assumed that their eyes would be shut. There was something deeply unsettling about those dead, empty eyes.

That’s when he noticed something weird going on along the edge of the thin white blanket covering the person in the bed. At first it was so subtle that he thought he might be imagining it. But when he looked closer, he saw that a six-inch section of the hem of the blanket was bunching up and smoothing out, then bunching up again. Almost as if it was being clutched in a small, invisible hand, and then released. Clutched and then released.

The bunching of the blanket seemed to be perfectly timed to match the heavy, irregular breath of the person beneath. But if it was just the rising and falling of the person’s chest that was moving the blanket, why was it only bunching up on one side, and not the other?

“Who the hell are you?” a female voice asked, startling Kieran so badly that he nearly dropped his package.

He spun to face the voice and saw a girl with a dark buzzcut standing in the doorway that led into the bathroom. She was pretty in a hard kind of way, with wary dark eyes and a sarcastic mouth. She was dressed in a hospital gown, the top hanging wide open to display her pale, xylophone chest.

“Man, you scared me,” he said, trying for friendly and non-threatening. He thought about trying to keep up the messenger pretense, but this wasn’t a staff member, so he decided to try a different approach. “I’m looking for Olivia Dunham. Do you know where she is?”

“I might,” the girl responded. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m her boyfriend,” Kieran said, knowing it was a risk, but hoping his admission would gain the girl’s sympathy. “I’m really worried about her. Is she okay?”

“Define okay,” the girl said. “Okay like me? Okay like Lisa Broccoli over there?”

“Broccoli?” Kieran frowned.

“As in she’s a vegetable, genius.” She rolled her eyes. “You’d better be smart, because you’re certainly not badass. In fact, you may be the lamest action hero of all time. Still, you get an A for effort, I guess. Got a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke,” Kieran said, frustration digging its nails into his gut. “Do you know where Olivia is, or don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” the girl said. “She’s in the lab with Doctor Lansen. She’s his little favorite now. He’s prepping her right now for his ‘special treatment.’”

The toxic, white-hot jealousy in her voice was so strong it could’ve stripped paint. It made Kieran sick to think of some weird doctor having his way with Olivia, but as his head spun to catch up with all of this new information, it also gave him an idea.

“Then we need to stop him,” he said. “It sounds to me that you don’t much like Olivia. You must want her out of the picture—don’t you? Well, I want her out of here, too. We both want the same thing, so help me find her and I’ll take her away. You’ll never have to see her again.

“Okay?”

The girl squinted at him, skeptical.

“Okay?” he repeated, his desperation building.

“How did you get in?” she asked.

“I stole a key card.”

“D level?”

“Yes.” What was she getting at?

She looked him up and down like she was sizing up a racehorse.

“Okay, listen,” she said. “At the end of the hall is the lounge, and a set of double doors. I’m going to go set off the Lindsey bomb in the lounge, and when all the orderlies come rushing in to handle it, we’ll slip out through those doors.”

“What’s a Lindsey bomb?”

“Trust me, okay,” she said. “Just be ready to make a break for those doors. They’ll let you out into the elevator area, and on the opposite side will be the door to the lab wing. Locked of course, but you have the key. Doctor Lansen’s lab is the second door on the left.”

Kieran didn’t exactly trust this strange, intense girl, but he also didn’t have a better plan.

Doctor Lansen watched nervously as the nurse wheeled Olivia into the lab.

He felt like a man on a first date. He’d already prepped and scrubbed in for the procedure, but kept finding himself raising an involuntary gloved hand to smooth back his cap-covered hair, and being forced to stop himself at the last minute.

The nurse transferred Olivia to the operating table and removed her underwear before strapping her legs into a pair of metal stirrups. Doctor Lansen watched anxiously as she started an intravenous drip in the crook of Olivia’s good arm. While it would allow the insemination process to proceed without protest or undue distress on the part of the subject, general anesthesia was out of the question. The Cortexiphan-enhanced part of the brain often remained active even while the subject was unconscious.

Conversely, the psychic suppression agent required to calm any neuroquakes either counteracted the standard anesthetics, or caused potentially dangerous cardiac arrhythmia when combined with other, more uncommon formulations.

The trickiest part of the process would come when the psychic suppression agent wore off. He’d learned the hard way—with previous subjects—that a kind of involuntary rebound effect occurred sometime between six and twelve hours after the initial dose was administered. Clustered neuroquakes of varying severity would hit like an internal storm and, depending on the particular Cortexiphan-induced abilities of the subject in question, a wide spectrum of potentially catastrophic phenomena could occur.

Given Olivia’s predilection for electrical and pyrokinetic disturbances, he had prepared a special recovery room for her in the lower ward, fully insulated in non-conductive, non-flammable material and equipped with a lightning rod to attract and safely ground any power surges. She and the unique zygote she would soon be carrying were too far precious for him to take any chances.

“That will be all for now, Helen,” he said to the nurse. “Thank you.”

The nurse gave a curt nod and left the room. He was alone with Olivia.

The hall outside was empty. The skinny girl with the buzzcut went first, padding down the hallway in her textured slipper-socks. Kieran followed close behind.

When they reached the open archway, the room beyond was revealed. A dull, blandly decorated dentist’s-waiting-room kind of area with two uncomfortable-looking, easy-to-clean vinyl couches and two bolted-down tables with ugly, dated chairs.

A scattered game of checkers lay ignored on one table. A few sad, dog-eared fashion magazines on the other. A sturdy television was bolted to the wall, currently showing an episode of
Friends.
On the far side there was another open doorway that looked like it led into a nurses station.

There was a single occupant in the room, a tiny Hispanic girl with a sad, heart-shaped face and thick, chapped lips. She seemed shy and child-like in her demeanor, although the curvy body beneath her hospital gown was much more grown up. Her thick, curly hair was held back with a pink-and-red scrunchie that matched the plush bunny in her arms.

“That’s Lindsey,” the skinny girl whispered to Kieran as she slunk over to the archway that led into the lounge. “Whenever her dad, well, you know... Her mom would scrub her with bleach and a wire brush.” As he let that horrifying concept sink in, she added, “You’d better stay back.”

Kieran did as he was told, adrenalin racing through his veins. He had no idea what to expect. All he could do was keep his eye on the big double doors, and be ready to bolt through them as soon as he had a chance.

“Lindsey’s dirty!” the skinny girl called into the lounge. “DIRTY!”

It was hard to see exactly what happened next, but there was a furious, almost inhuman wail and a burst of fluffy white stuffing like the aftermath of a pillow fight.

“I’m not!” Lindsey wailed. “I’M NOT DIRTY!”

An ugly chair came flying out into the hallway, followed by the sound of shattering glass. As the girl had predicted, a pack of orderlies came rushing through the double doors, running for the lounge, while nurses poured out of the nurses’ station like angry hornets.