Time Clock Hero (21 page)

Dr. Patrick Carson, wearing a dark blue suit blotched with shades of gray dust, smiled and looked at Phoenix.  He recognized him instantly.  “And why you’re here, I cannot begin to guess,” he said.

“I’m the cure, if you can believe that,” Phoenix said.  “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Of course you aren’t.  But that’s not why you’re here.”

Phoenix said not a word.  Instead, he rummaged through his dark green pack.  “Everything except the gun,” he said.  He dug through the pack again, like a woman on a first date looking for a Tic Tac, and found his phone sitting beneath the halo he’d picked up back at the prison.  He pulled out the phone, waved it in front of Dr. Carson, and turned it on.

“Who sent you?”  Dr.  Carson asked. 

Phoenix looked at Dr. Carson.  The question was an invitation to pry him open like the tin of rotten fish he believed him to be. “Tell me about Phillip Mercer,” he said.  “And why did you photoshop a Krystal’s coupon onto his shirt?”

“Because that’s how I remembered him,” Dr. Carson said.  “No reason, other than that.  I did it years ago.”

Phoenix stepped closer to Dr. Carson, coming to within a few feet of him, staring at every feature of his face.  “Where is Phillip Mercer?”

“As you know, he’s---”

“He’s dead?  And you don’t know where Phillip Mercer is?”

“We buried him at---”

“Did you have Phillip Mercer’s body exhumed a little over a week ago?”

Dr. Carson took a deep breath and nodded his head.  “I had him exhumed – and I took him. Just a little payback. That hardly matters now.  I did what I had to do.”

Payback?  For what?

“Does the virus come from your lab?”

“I have the cure for it.  I think that answers the next question.”

Dr. Carson turned and walked back towards his chair, a wooden one, sitting next to another chair pushed up under a matching wooden table.  He grabbed a bottled water, Evian, and came back and handed it to Phoenix. 

Phoenix removed the lid and slipped it into his pocket.  He drank the bottle down to a third and said, “How can you live with yourself?”

“But you’re not here to ask that question – though I will answer it,” Dr. Carson.  “And I will do so by asking you a question.”

Phoenix took another drink.

Dr. Carson, with all the seriousness of a man self-assured, said: “A wife screams for her husband to step on a roach – screams, mind you – but he says and does nothing because he’s too busy worrying that he will mess up his new dress shoes.”

Phoenix stopped drinking and slowly lowered the bottle away from his lips.  He became as still as stone and felt just as cold.

“And all he has to do is look down and step,” Dr. Carson said, pointing his finger towards the floor.  “One simple act and the problem is solved – history is changed.  Tracy does not slip on the stairs when she tries to flee from said flying roach.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” Phoenix answered, shifting on his feet.

“Nonsense?  Hardly.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“But I do,” Dr. Carson said.  “Now, can you answer the first question, the one you asked me?  How can you live with
yourself
after what you let happen to Tracy?”

“How can you possibly know about that?”

Dr. Carson waved the last question off with a wave of his hand.  “Stay focused.  Now, Eric Sawyer,” he said.  “Who could’ve seen it coming?  He asked me if such a thing as Psyke, the drug Marcus Cain had ingeniously come up with from the top of his head was real and if it would be easy to make.  He reassured me his interest in it was all hypothetical, of course – and I said to him, ‘This is how I would do it.’”

“Mariela Diaz,” Phoenix whispered.

“Six words,” Dr. Carson said, “that changed the world –
this is how I would do it
.”

Phoenix nodded.

“The real what-might-have-been for me and her,” Dr. Carson said.  “I loved her, you know.  And so I assume you reference that episode when you ask me how I am able to live with myself.”  He paused and shook his head.  “I’ve spent every year since Mariela’s death trying to erase what happened.  But really, you can’t hope to erase such things.  In the end, you hope to forget them.  But not really.  You just keep hoping that all of the good you’ve done will be enough to make up for it.”

“And the Psyke Virus – or whatever it is – it belongs to you, doesn’t it?”

“If I say yes, will my answer change anything?”

“You can cure it.  You said you could.  You can turn this around.”

Dr. Carson grimaced.  “If I could save the present world tonight, I would.  But if you can get me back to my lab, and get me into the vaults, I can save mankind.”

“There’s a difference between trying to save one and the other?”  The phone, which Phoenix stuffed into his front pocket, vibrated.  He pulled it out and swiped the call icon.  “I’m here.”

Dr. Carson leaned forward and said, “Hello Phillip, you gutless coward.”

Phoenix jerked his head back, moved away from Dr. Carson, and said in a soft, shaky voice, “Phillip Mercer?”  Phoenix held his hand up against his opposite ear.  “Yes … uh, huh … no, no, no – I’m in here … you just heard him, didn’t you?  You keep … I said you keep breaking up – yes … now I can hear you.” 

Dr. Carson returned to his seat and picked up a book while Phoenix did more listening than he did talking.  A minute or two later, and after Phoenix had walked from one end of the room to the other and back, the call ended; and Phoenix slid the phone back into his front pocket.

“I figured he’d call you sooner or later,” Dr. Carson said.

“Phillip Mercer isn’t dead then, is he?”  Phoenix said.  “You lied to me.  There was never a body in that casket, was there?”

“Given the circumstances, my lie is of such insufficient weight as to be meaningless,” Dr. Carson said.  “Phillip Mercer – how should I say it? –
conducts
himself rather elegantly these days, as you will soon find out.”

“Soon?”  Phoenix said.  “How soon?”

“As soon as you get us out of here and get us both back to the lab,” Dr. Carson said.  “That’s why you’re here, aren’t you?”  Dr. Carson put his book down, folded his large hands, and set them on his lap.  And he just sat there, with his head up and his eyes boring straight into the skull of Phoenix Malone.  The look on his face, stern, and his jaw, hard and rigid, seethed with accusation.  It looked like a mother’s face as she waited for her child’s confession that yes, it was he who’d set a match to the laundry hamper, and that’s why the entire house had burned to the ground.

Phoenix looked away from Dr. Cason and checked the time.  Alaia would be here in an hour, guns blazing and a vehicle ready – that’s what Phillip Mercer had said – and then he and Dr. Carson would have to make a run for it.  He heard a snap and looked back at Dr. Carson, who had his hand up in the air.

Did he really just snap his fingers at me?

“You really aren’t oblivious, Detective Malone,” Dr. Carson said.  “You’re just hiding everything in those
dark recesses
of your mind. 
Dark recesses
.  I like that term.  Your whole being, all that you are, you keep in one big room.  Every morning you wake up and walk down that awful hallway where the plaster is falling out of the ceiling, and you go to that room – loving it and hating it at the same time.  You hate it because you know what’s in it, and you love it because you think the truth of who you are is nicely tucked away and out of sight where it will never hurt anybody.  And so you go about your business or – what was it you asked me earlier? – you live with yourself.  Or should I say, the
illusion
of yourself?”

Phoenix smiled crookedly.  He was conversing with a mad man.

“And it never occurs to you that maybe, just maybe, the reason someone might want to throw back the shutters to your little hideaway is because they genuinely want you to see what’s really there – the dust, the cobwebs, the trash – all of it.  And maybe they’re doing it, not because they want to laugh at you and belittle you – or even accuse you – but because maybe they want to help you clean it all up.”

Phoenix pulled out his phone again and looked at the time.

“Do you believe in second chances, Detective Malone?”

“Are you offering me one?”

Dr. Carson yawned and looked at this watch.  “What time are we leaving here?”

“Hour, give or take.”

Dr. Carson leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.  “Wake me up in thirty minutes, won’t you?”

Phoenix walked over to the door with his lips pursed and, as he walked, he looked back at Dr. Carson.  He shook his head, almost said something, but turned away.  But then he stopped.  He just stood there looking through the glass pane in the door, greatly shaken by what Dr. Carson had said and by what he hadn’t said.  All those words, words about his wife Tracy, hurt him. How did he know?  And if Dr. Carson knew that, he knew of her surgery and how it had all gone terribly wrong and how she’d ended up in a coma.  Did he know that she’d contracted – no, that wasn’t the right word for it – that
someone
had injected her with the Psyke Virus?  That he’d gone to see her and ended up putting a bullet in her skull?  Cobb must have been working for Dr. Carson.

Phoenix walked to the door, reached up, and locked it.  Then he sat down, leaned back, and closed his eyes.  A feeling of cold darkness, a despair so deep and consuming, settled over him like a cold blanket.  He closed his eyes and tricked his mind into not caring, and he fell asleep.

An explosion, a crackling, rolling thunder, rattled Phoenix from his sleep.  Particles of ceiling tile, like snowflakes, fell from the ceiling.  An overhead light fixture broke free, dangled by its wires on one end, and came crashing down in a shower of sparks.  It landed on top of the MRI machine and tumbled to the floor.  The hospital alarm, a loud, throbbing noise, sounded.  Phoenix jumped to his feet, looking frantically around the room.  Dr. Carson had gone.  He picked up his pack and flung open the door.

Dr. Carson was standing just outside the door, sipping on an Evian.  “Seems like our guards aren’t anywhere to be seen.  Seems lucky if you ask me.”

The lights flickered and dimmed to half-light, hovering somewhere between tipsy and drunk.  A few seconds later, they went out.  The emergency exit lights engaged, casting their scant but useful light near the exits.

“Nothing’s ever this easy,” Phoenix said, as he scanned the room for a weapon.  He shouldered his pack, grabbed an IV stand, and took it apart.  Shouting came from the long hall to the right.  Hiding in the darkness wouldn’t be too hard but, more likely than not, Black Ops were on their way; and they’d be here soon to secure their two packages.

Just as Phoenix started leading Dr. Carson through the double doors on the left, the doors crashed open.  Phoenix pulled Dr. Carson back, throwing him off balance, just before the doors hit him.  Alaia came charging into the room, her shot gun in one hand, an AK in the other.  She handed Phoenix her shotgun and offered the AK to Dr. Carson.

“I could never kill anyone,” he said. “So I think you’d better hold onto that.”

Alaia set the gun down and slid her pack off of her shoulders.  “These people you need to be killing aren’t just anyone,” she said, with her voice low; and she pulled out two of the pipe bombs and a lighter.

“So that’s what we just heard?” Phoenix asked.

Alaia scrunched her eyes.  “No time to talk.”  She put her pack back on and slung the AK over her left shoulder.  “Van’ll be up in a few seconds.  Let’s move.”

They turned to leave.  A loud crash came from down the hall behind them, and they heard a number of men yell, “Freeze!”

Phoenix raised the shotgun and took out the emergency light above his head.  He hurried everyone through the door, then pulled out his flashlight.

“Wait,” Alaia said.  She smashed the glass on a fire extinguisher box, lit a pipe bomb, and carefully balanced it behind the fire extinguisher.  Convinced it wouldn’t fall over, she told Phoenix to turn out his flashlight and follow her down the hall towards the yellow, flickering glow of the blazing front entrance.  She stopped at the corner and told everyone to get down.  “Watch the rear, Phoenix.”  Alaia leaned forward and looked around the corner.  “Heck of mess out there, that’s for sure.”

The doors leading to the MRI area opened slowly, and three men, with their weapons raised, stepped into the hall.  One of them saw the sparking of the pipe bomb fuse and cried out just as the bomb, sitting at chest level, exploded in a brilliant burst of white light and smoke.  The fire extinguisher hurtled through the air and slammed into the sheetrock on the opposite wall.  The men retreated, and the door snapped shut behind them.  The overhead sprinklers kicked in, sending a fine, cold, drenching rain down upon everyone.

“At least we won’t burn now,” Phoenix said.  He aimed the semi-auto twelve gauge down the hall, released the safety, and fired off two rounds.  The buck slammed into the doors, probably perforating them with holes as big as a man’s head.  “That’ll keep ‘em back for a few seconds.”

“Let’s go,” Alaia said.  “Deep breath everybody.”  She stood up into a half-standing, half-crouching position and hurried around the corner.  She moved as quickly as she could in the drenching downpour, in the direction the main exit, the one she’d so beautifully just destroyed.

Gray, acrid smoke, nearly opaque, as thick as any storm cloud, hid them from sight as they made their way forward.  Broken glass, pieces of wooden chairs, a door ripped from a door frame, lay at their feet.  The muted glow of fire, darkly orange, like fire from a garbage can full of burning plastic, rose up like ghosts to their right and left. 

Alaia, in her hurry forward, caught her foot and fell over, landing on something soft and mushy.  Dr. Carson helped her up and reeled, staggering backward in horror when he saw Alaia and his hands covered with bits of blood and torn flesh. 

“Hurry,” Phoenix said.  “No gawking or puking.”  He nudged Dr. Carson past the body and then guided him over another.  He was glad he couldn’t see the faces of the dead and wondered if they had any faces at all.

More voices came from up ahead.  Voices yelling orders, others acknowledging them – and the sound of a water hissing through a large fire hose.

Alaia stopped, handed her wet pipe bomb to Dr. Carson, and unslung her AK.  Up ahead, just near the exit, part of the ceiling and wall collapsed, bursting into flames, sending a lethal cloud of smoke and dust floating in their direction. 

Dr. Carson looked at the pipe bomb and threw it to his left. 

“You know we might just need that!”  Alaia said, raising her voice above the din. 

“I won’t be a party to any killing,” Dr. Carson yelled.

Their way forward blocked, the fumes filling the air and their lungs with thick, dark smoke, Phoenix grabbed Alaia’s shoulder and swung her around.  “Back the way we came!  We can get---”

“What did you say?”  Alaia shouted.

Phoenix waved at Alaia and Dr. Carson, and he began to cough.  He ran back the way they’d just come, stopping at the hall leading towards the MRI room.  Phoenix handed Dr. Carson the flashlight.  “Light us up, Doc!”

Dr. Carson took the flashlight and nodded.  “If you think this is bad, just you wait until---”

Phoenix didn’t have time.  He leveled the shotgun and ran back down the hall, half expecting to see the three men that had come through the doors earlier.  The smoke came up behind them, crawling along the ceiling, and the sprinklers kept running. 

Alaia grabbed the door handle and nodded to Phoenix.  He raised the gun to his shoulder.

“On the count of three, two, one---” Alaia opened the door. 

Dr. Carson’s light, because he had aimed it high, blinded one solitary guard who, instead of shooting, cried out and dropped his weapon. 

Phoenix grabbed the boy by his collar and Alaia scanned the room in the faint beams of the exit lights.

“I’ve never shot no one before,” the boy said.  “Honest, mister!”

Phoenix recognized the boy.  Slim face, skinny, light blonde hair under his black cap, a large, prominent nose.  He was one of the guards who brought him down from Bobbie Jones’ office a few hours earlier, the one he’d warned, the one he’d heard say he wanted to leave.

“Grab the gun,” Phoenix said firmly.  “This old guy is the cure – but we’ve got to get him out of here.  Are you with me?”

“Yes … yes, sir,” the boy said.

Phoenix knelt down and picked up the boy’s weapon and handed it to him.

“I know I didn’t just see that,” Alaia said, as she pointed her AK at the guard’s chest.  “He’s just gonna shoot us in the back, that’s what he’s gonna do.”

“And you don’t know if we’ll be able to find a way out of here either, do you?” Phoenix said to Alaia.

Alaia raised her eyebrows.  “We’re not doing this.”  She aimed her gun at the boy’s chest.

Dr. Carson stepped in between the boy and Alaia, wrapping his hand around the muzzle of the gun, forcing it downward.  “Haven’t you seen enough death to last for the next two-thousand years?”

“You’re asking me that when I’m rescuing you from a bunch of thugs with guns?”  Alaia said.

“Yes, I’m asking you---”

The doors at the far end of room, the ones they’d just come through, opened without warning, and a burst of gun fire, high and wild, ripped through the air, hitting the ceiling and walls.  Everyone hit the deck – Dr. Carson with Alaia under him, Phoenix alone, but in a position to fire off the remaining rounds of double-aught buck in the direction from which the shots had come, and then the boy by himself.

For a second they lay there, motionless, trying to listen above the sound of the alarm for the reloading or cocking of weapons, the shout of voices, or the running of boots.  Nothing.

Phoenix got up.  “Magazine, Alaia, now.  Who the heck makes a lousy a six-round magazine?  Is that a joke?”

Dr. Carson helped Alaia up.  She quickly removed her pack and pulled out another magazine, a round, black, drum magazine.  “Eighteen rounds, baby.”  She handed it Phoenix and he handed her back the empty.

“Let’s go, son,” Phoenix said to the boy, as he gently nudged him with his boot.

The boy didn’t move.

Dr. Carson bent over and felt the boy’s neck.  He stood up and, in a flat, monotone voice, said, “He’s gone.”  He reached out and took hold of Alaia’s shirt and jerked her towards himself; and he put his face right up into hers.  He pointed at the boy.  “That belongs to you, Detective Jenkins.  Had you decided to leave things well enough alone, this boy would still be alive.  Funny how you don’t understand love enough to know that, one day, your own son will need be shown mercy.”  Dr. Carson pushed Alaia backwards, and she stumbled on a chair and fell to the ground.  He bent over and put his finger in her face.  “That boy’s death is your fault.”

“Let’s go,” Phoenix said.

Dr. Carson helped Alaia to her feet.

Alaia Jenkins didn’t say a word, though she searched through her feelings and intellect for some phrase to define what had just happened.  She wanted the boy dead, and she would have pulled the trigger.  Dr. Carson had stopped her, stopped her cold; and then he threw her to the floor and protected her, with his own body, against the spray of bullets that had been fired from across the room.  Was this the man behind Psyke and the Psyke Virus? 

Phoenix pushed everyone across the office space and into the next hall.  The emergency lights cast a grim and unearthly glow on a single dead guard, an older man, who lay sprawled out on the floor with his left foot under his right leg.  Phoenix pulled the body away from the door and looked out.

Another hallway, without carpet, tiled in dark iron-colored tiles, reminded him of the tiles he’d seen in the lobby on his way in.  Clouds of smoke, getting thicker by the minute, burned his nostrils.  Men and women yelled, their voices coming from around the corner down the hall and to the left, back towards the front of the building. 

Phoenix ran into the hall, crouching for fresher air, and turned right.  He came to another door, the door to the supply area.  The door was fob activated and he paused.

Alaia pushed him aside.  “These doors are fail safe, Phoenix.”  She turned the lever and the door opened.  She ran into the supply room with her weapon raised.  A few nurses, all of them standing by the open door leading out to the delivery parking area, looked at them as if nothing was happening.

“Is there anyone else out there who can help with the fire?”  Alaia asked, trying to look like the hired help.

The girls looked over and shook their heads. 

Phoenix led the way out through the back of the hospital, taking the long way around, dodging a few infected who had been drawn to the noise of the explosion.  When they reached the far end of the parking lot five minutes later, at the exact place Alaia had left the van, she began to panic. 

The van was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Darkeem?”  Alaia said, her eyes blinking rapidly.  A few scattered infected people, some standing in the parking lot, others caught up in the shrubs, began struggling in their direction.  “Where’s … where’s Darkeem?”  She raised her AK, but Phoenix pushed the barrel down.

“Is this where you left them?”  Phoenix asked.  “Think.  But don’t shoot.”

“I don’t know,” Alaia said.  “But they were supposed to meet me in front of the hospital entrance – that’s all I know.  They knew to … Beth knew to drive up once the lights went out.  That’s what Phillip Mercer said to do.”

“We took a detour, Alaia,” Phoenix said.  “You didn’t have a back-up plan?”

Alaia shook her head.

“You know you’re always supposed to have a---”

Dr. Carson put his hand on Phoenix’s shoulder.  “You’re not helping.  Maybe we need to walk towards the---”

The sounds of staccato gunfire broke the silence, popping in the darkness in small bursts of three and four rounds.  It came from near the entrance.  Phoenix, Alaia, and Dr. Carson hurried up onto the sidewalk, pushed through the shrubs, and flattened themselves against the wall.

They could hear the sound of running feet, light and swift, coming in their direction.  Then the cries of men.  The beams of two or three flashlights danced wildly across the sidewalk, and two or three solitary shots rang out, just as the running feet neared them. 

Darkeem, with an AK in his hands, stumbled and fell on the sidewalk, screaming out, writhing in agony with his hands trying to reach behind him.

Alaia struggled towards Darkeem, but Phoenix grabbed her and pulled her back into the shrubs before the approaching group of men could see her.  He put his hand over her mouth.

Phoenix held her tightly.  “There’s nothing you can do for him now.”