Sleep Tight (29 page)

And so he would never be able to fall asleep.

Not until this was finished, one way or another.

 

Qween and Dr. Menard picked their way through a sub-basement full of old conference chairs, outdated copy machines, and plenty of cobwebs. On the far wall, Qween found a large panel with three long lines scratched in the metal. At first glance, it looked as if it was just regular wear and tear, but if you cocked your head just right, the three scratches eventually arranged themselves into a ragged capital H. Qween pulled it away from the wall, revealing a large vertical air duct. “Old Henry told me about this place. He holes up back here when it gets too cold.”

Dr. Menard peered down into the absolute darkness and sighed. “I don’t know if I’ll fit.”

Qween snorted. “If I can fit, you can fit. I’ll go first, ya big baby.” It was old enough and big enough that she fit without straining too much, using her butt and knees to slow her descent. She looked up at Dr. Menard’s silhouette, framed within a square of dusty light. “Almost there, Doc. Your hospital is on the other side of this wall. You want in quiet, this is how we get there.”

Dr. Menard didn’t say anything, but he climbed inside, blocking the light. She heard him coming down in a shuffling slide. Ten feet down, Qween hit the bottom of the shaft. It stretched away on both sides. She called up, “Head to your left when you get down here.”

She crawled along until a hazy blob of faint light appeared. The light sharpened into a square of horizontal strips as Qween got closer. She pressed her face against the grill, looking at another large, forgotten, filthy storage room, full of discarded furniture, outdated technology, and boxes full of mold.

Something was different about this one, though. It almost looked as if a flood had been flash frozen as it tore through the room, the murky water solidified midsurge. The edges clung to the corners and under conference room tables, and the shadows collected and pooled in the dim light.

She dug around in her cloak and found a tiny flashlight. She clicked it on.

Dr. Menard’s voice was half-surprised, half irritated. “You’ve had a flashlight this whole time and didn’t use it?”

Qween said, “You’re a smart man. Woulda thought you’d know these take batteries. They ain’t free and they ain’t cheap. Ain’t gonna use ’em up when I don’t need to.” She aimed the light down at the material, but still couldn’t figure out what it was. It almost looked like black sand had collected in drifts over the years. She got impatient and gave the grill a solid thump with the bottom of her fist, knocking it out of the way. It hit something hard directly under the airshaft, bounced off into the center of the room, landing in the drifts with a soft thump, sending a cloud of the stuff flying into the air. The debris settled fairly quickly, and Qween decided it wasn’t dust. Too heavy.

She stuck her head out and saw they had gotten lucky; a table had been shoved against the wall directly under the airshaft. She rotated her body and stuck her feet out first, then lowered herself to the table. She kept her flashlight on the whole time, watching to make sure that whatever the material was, it wasn’t moving.

One wild thought kept bouncing around her head, and although she dismissed it as being too ridiculous, it kept coming back. She was worried that they’d stumbled into a nest of those damn bugs, but there was no way that many bugs would clump together in one place like this. No way. So she flicked the light around the mounds of what looked like rich black soil. But she knew it wasn’t dirt. The particles were a touch too large for one thing, and the other was that they were flat, and lacked the way soil crumbled when it fell apart. It wasn’t clay, or mud.

Dr. Menard climbed out of the airshaft and sneezed.

Qween got down and leaned over the edge of the table. She held the flashlight close to a stagnant wave of the substance. It wasn’t exactly black; that was just the lack of light in the sub-basement. Up close, the stuff was a dark reddish-brown, and in some spots, almost translucent. Whatever it was, it wasn’t alive. She reached out to touch it; most of it crumbled to dust under her fingers. She cupped her hand, and brought a sample up so they could get a better look.

“Any ideas, Doc?”

“I don’t . . .” Dr. Menard trailed off. He pinched some of the stuff between his thumb and forefinger, taking the flashlight from her hand and holding the lens an inch away. The substance reminded Qween of fish scales for some reason.

“Oh good Christ,” Dr. Menard whispered. “It’s all the shells, it’s their exoskeletons. These bedbugs, they molt. Five times, if I can remember it correctly. And this . . .” The flashlight swept the room. The dark material was a least two feet deep, sometimes higher near the walls and some of the furniture. “This is what is left, when . . . when they . . .”

“When they shuck they skin,” Qween finished for him.

Dr. Menard’s eyes raced around the huge room. “This city has got a bigger problem than anyone realizes. There’s nothing on record.... I don’t think there’s anything that indicates . . . There’s gotta be . . . millions of exoskeletons here. Billions.” He swallowed. “If these things carry that virus, we are all in such big trouble.”

“I don’t have no fancy degree or anything, but I coulda told you that. So let’s get moving.” She slid off the table into the drifts of the shells of dead bugs. They came up to her knees. It felt like when she was a little girl, playing in an old silo full of wheat chaff. “We ain’t going back the way we came, ’less you can climb up that air shaft.”

Dr. Menard tucked the bottoms of his pants into his socks, then retied his shoes as tight as possible. “If we can’t get back out this way, how were you planning on getting out?” He pushed off the table into the dry swamp, feet disappearing from view as they slid through all those tiny exoskeletons.

Qween gave a dry, rasping laugh. “Shit. Never promised you a way to get out. Just a way to get inside. Once we’re in there, it’s your call. Figured you’d have an idea.” She waded through the drifts, heading for the door.

“I’m not coming back this way, I can tell you that much,” Dr. Menard said.

“What you worried about? Ain’t nothing here but a bunch of old shells. Shit, you oughta see what’s left after a crawfish boil on Maxwell Street. Now there, there’s a mess. This? This ain’t gonna slow us down. This is just a billion crunchy ghosts is all.”

 

Tommy still sat with Don’s corpse. There were no windows, no clock. He had no idea how long he’d been locked in the room. The IV bags hanging from the rod that rose above his right shoulder were empty. The slick plastic bag attached to his catheter that hung down by his left leg was full of urine. He did not know if he had been asleep or awake; the edges between consciousness and oblivion were getting blurry.

Sometimes he thought he saw bugs. On the bed. Lately, on the floor.

Tommy wondered if he was starting to hallucinate.

Driven down to nothing, he went back to testing the leather straps, flexing each arm and leg, giving each side a chance to rest while he yanked with the other side. It didn’t work. No matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t recreate whatever combination of movements had led to that wonderfully elusive sound of popping thread. He worried that he was getting too weak. He had no idea the last time his body had gotten any kind of nourishment.

Now, instead of phantom flickers in his mind of Dr. Reischtal laughing at him from behind the monitors, of infected patients running howling through the halls, he could only see his daughter’s face. This was worse than anything. Watching her expression fall from warmth and joy to soul-crushing terror and pain as men’s hands groped and clutched and squeezed.

Tommy bucked and flailed at the wheelchair straps, howling and weeping, sobbing promises to Dr. Reischtal, to anyone watching, begging for release.

Something gave. More movement from one of the straps. He realized that it was the combination of jerking his left arm and right leg at the same time that gave him enough leverage. He tried it again. The tearing sound was perhaps the most blissful thing he’d heard in his life.

Soon, he had enough slack in the leather strap around his right ankle that he could pull his foot free. He used it to get a better grip on the plastic covering the floor, and pushed back around, away from the door, toward Don. The wall behind the bed and camera was filled with cabinets and Tommy was hoping for some kind of blade.

He stopped. Cold. At least five or six bugs were now clearly visible on the floor. He could only guess that they were leaving Don to come looking for the only warm body in the room. Using his toes, Tommy got the wheelchair rocking and angled it to the side, crushing a bug. Rolling back and forth, he used the wheels to smash every bug he could find, one by one.

He edged around the bed and tried not to think about the cold, clotted blood under his bare foot and hoped that the virus couldn’t survive for hours in a cool temperature. Once on the other side of the bed, the first thing he did was kick the camera over. It didn’t shatter like he had hoped, but it still felt halfway satisfying. Of course, he couldn’t do anything about the one in the ceiling.

Using his toes, he pulled the drawers open, swung the cabinet doors wide. Nothing useful. No scalpels. No bone saws. Just soft supplies, like rubber gloves, sheets, replacement paper towels for above the small sink. A goddamn bedpan.

He looked back to the door. Maybe he could push himself back, see if he couldn’t figure out how to unlock it. If he could get out of this room, he might be able to find something, anything that could help him get free of the wheelchair.

Tommy was halfway around the bed when there was a loud click, and Sgt. Reaves opened the door.

 

 

It wasn’t until the third bus was almost full that Sam had to make an example out of somebody.

They’d brought out sixty-two prisoners, splitting them between the three buses. Over half of these were low-level security concerns, mostly old white guys with three DUIs and black kids who still didn’t understand the difference between a federal charge of intent to sell versus the lesser Illinois charge of simple possession. These kids saw themselves as proud warriors, following in the footsteps of their fathers, uncles, and brothers. As if it was some kind of honorable career choice. However, they were still new enough that federal prison scared the living shit out of them. So they were fine, no trouble at all. Neither were the three or four junkies, so strung out that they thought they might be in hell.

The rest were career criminals, serial rapists, neighborhood narcotic kingpins, and guys who couldn’t manage to walk past a car without trying to steal it. For the most part, they were docile, and didn’t give anybody any trouble. The guards brought them down and out through the visiting area, further disrupting the prisoners’ expectations. All prisoners were normally moved in and out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center through a special passageway along the fifth floor of the parking garage. Instead, Ed and Sam had them led out into the plaza, then around to Clark, where the buses were waiting.

Trouble came with Inmate No. 928743.

Inmate No. 928743 didn’t want to get his wristband scanned. Every prisoner wore one. They were all brand new, made of the same plastic that was used in clothing store security tags. Shockproof. Waterproof. Came with a bar code that identified the prisoner. Ed had demanded that they scan the codes at every step, just to keep track, so a guard would scan the number of every prisoner as they got on the bus.

Ed monitored everything from inside, eyes flicking across a bank of monitors. He used his phone to talk to Sam. For everything else he gave orders to the warden, who passed it on to the appropriate personnel. He had just sent the first batch of truly dangerous repeat offenders out to the buses, mixed with an equal number of first timers.

The biggest threats to the MCC evacuation were the guys awaiting sentencing for heavy crimes like murder, aggravated assault, and rape. They’d already been found guilty, probably had burned through an appeal or two, and were just sitting around to find out how many years they were going to spend behind bars. They were the walking definition of nothing to lose.

Inmate No. 928743 clasped his cuffed hands at his waist when the guard held up the scanner and said, “No.”

The guard stepped back across the sidewalk, putting some distance between himself and the prisoner, trained to withdraw from one-on-one challenges. The two guards on either side of the bus doors watched and waited for an order. Ed watched it on the video monitors. He called Sam.

Sam answered with, “Already on it.” While Ed had been watching from deep inside the prison, Sam was outside, leaning against the wall, chewing a fresh stick of gum, and watching the prisoners step on the buses. He’d been expecting someone like this, an opportunist who could smell the insanity on the wind, taste the chaos impatiently waiting just under the crumbling surface of order, someone who would test the limits of authority.

Sam made eye contact with a guard who carried a twelve-gauge and made sure the guard was paying attention. Then he moved toward Inmate No. 928743. “Afternoon.”

The prisoner cocked his head and regarded Sam coolly.

Sam smiled. “Listen, I don’t care what your problem is. My advice, get over it. This is your first and only warning.”

Inmate No. 928743 planted his feet shoulder-width apart, and smiled right back, equally scary and empty. Amateur tattoos, bluish gray in the hazy sunlight, crawled up his neck and all over his bald skull. “My civil rights are being violated.”

“No, no, they’re not,” Sam said. “Not yet.” With no wasted movement, he brought his lower leg up, square and true, smashing the tibia bone into Inmate’s No. 928743’s testicles. The seismic shock had barely begun rising from the prisoner’s torso into his chest when Sam broke his nose with a fast little jab.

As a teenager, Sam had taken classes from an old ex-Israeli soldier who had showed the lanky boy a few vicious Krav Maga moves. The man’s fighting philosophy was basically that if anyone was threating you, then you hurt them before they had a chance to hurt you, and hurt them bad enough that by the time they’re even thinking about getting up off the floor, you’re far, far way.

Blood exploded from Inmate No. 928743’s nostrils the same time the devastating effect of his crushed testicles hit his brain. He went down like a rotten tree, every part of him collapsing into the concrete. Sam had to give the guy credit. Inmate No. 928743 still managed to crawl forward a few feet before he curled into a fetal position and vomited on himself. Urine stained the front of his pants.

Sam turned to the guard with the .12 gauge. The guard tossed the shotgun; Sam caught it, brought the stock around and cracked the prisoner’s skull. Fresh blood erupted out of the man’s shaved head, washed over the tattoos, and spilled down over his already bleeding nose and started a puddle on the sidewalk.

Sam had deliberately hit the guy in the head with the stock, instead of some softer, perhaps more painful location, because head wounds bled like a bitch. Both Ed and Sam wanted the rest of the inmates to see the blood. You could be borderline retarded, even damn near brain damaged, but everybody coming out of the prison would understand what blood on the ground meant.

 

 

The massive lobby of the Fin was cool despite the sunlight that flooded through the three stories of windows. The three soldiers pushed through the spinning glass doors and took a moment to enjoy the delicious chill as it settled into the sweat that coated the inside of their fatigues.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” one said.

“We got thirty seconds before McLeary is on our ass,” another pointed out.

“Hello?” the third called out, moving toward the sleek front desk. “Hello?” he called again. “Anybody here?” He turned back to the first two. “Hey, you guys know if this building’s been cleared yet?”

They shrugged. The third muttered, “Shit. Just what we need. Wasting time checking an empty building.”

The second shook his head. “They shouldn’t have. Supposed to be on our grid.” He pulled out a radio and spoke into it. “Command? This is Charlie one-two-seven, that’s Charlie one-two-seven. I need confirmation on a location. Over.”

A burst of static from the radio. It swelled, then settled into a low hiss. “Command, you copy? I need verification that a building has been cleared. Over.” Still no response. “Goddamnit. These pieces of shit.”

“What do you want, man? They work in the desert,” one of the soldiers said. “Too many fucking tall buildings here.”

The third soldier stuck his head in the back office. “Hello? Hello? Anybody here? Anybody?”

Deep in the back office, Janelle was hiding under one of the desks, breathing fast, almost hyperventilating, sound asleep. She had curled up under of the far desks, wedging herself into the tightest corner possible, like a lost lamb under a dead tree, frozen in both snow and fear.

“Fuck it, dude,” the other soldier said. “We don’t get back out on the grid, McLeary’s gonna shit a brick. ’Sides, isn’t Winston and those boys supposed to double back through, confirm that everything’s been cleared?”

“Supposed to. Let’s head back outside, see if the radio works any better.”

The first two soldiers groaned when they stepped back out into the sun. The third soldier hit the button on his radio again, suddenly shielded his eyes and pointed. The other two saw the rat at once, working its way along one of the graceful, curving flower beds, trying to remain hidden under the leaves. All three soldiers opened fire.

Chips of concrete, flower petals, dirt, fertilizer, and rat flesh exploded into a pink and brown cloud. When the dust settled, there wasn’t enough left of the rat to fill a sandwich Baggie.

“I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t fun,” one of the soldiers said as they wandered over to the flowers to look for any more rats. The gunfire attracted the attention of one of the grid commanders. Once he understood that it was only one rat, he sent a decon crew over to spray the area down with the sterilization foam.

Behind them, the lobby remained empty and quiet.

 

 

Sergeant Reaves said nothing as he surveyed Don’s hospital room. He wore a hazmat suit, minus the helmet. His expression never changed as he regarded bloody corpse, the tire tracks in the blood on the floor, the overturned camera, the open cabinets. He paused and tilted his head when he saw the dead bugs. When his gaze settled on Tommy, Tommy tried not to look like a child who’d been caught trying to steal a cookie and had accidentally knocked the cookie jar to the floor where it shattered. Sergeant Reaves’s gaze never wavered.

Tommy shrugged.

Sergeant Reaves blinked, took a deep breath, held it, and walked over to Tommy, rubber hazmat boots crunching on the dried blood. He leaned over Tommy, placed one gloved hand over his face. With his thumb and forefinger, he spread Tommy’s right eyebrow and cheek, widening the eye to painful extremes. He repeated the movement with Tommy’s left eye, peering intently at Tommy’s eyeball. Satisfied, he released Tommy’s head and spun the wheelchair around, so that Tommy faced the far side of the room.

Tommy had no idea how his eyes might give something away, and had a nightmarish flash that Sergeant Reaves was simply going to pull out his pistol and put a bullet in the back of his head. He tensed, waiting for that blast of oblivion, but Sergeant Reaves simply dragged the wheelchair backwards through the blood to the doorway and out into the hallway.

Sergeant Reaves exhaled outside the room. He wheeled Tommy down the hall to the elevator and they waited in silence for the doors to open.

Tommy wondered if he was being taken back to his original room. One entire wall had been covered with a heavy curtain, and Tommy was convinced it had concealed a window. If he could just get out of his wheelchair, he might have a chance at breaking through the window. And if he could break the window, he could climb out. He didn’t care if there was a ledge or not, he’d take the risks of climbing out of a twelve- or thirteen-story room compared to facing Sergeant Reaves or Dr. Reischtal.