The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (24 page)

Instinct took over and I jumped to the side. I hit the ground and rolled to the nearest tree as lightning struck and the accompanying thunder deafened me.

I flicked off the flashlight and peered around the tree. It was pitch black without the light on. Manetti was only ten steps away but I couldn’t see her.

“Manetti!” I yelled.

No answer.

“Eddie! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

White sounded like he was a kid, just playing hide and seek.

“I’m going to fucking kill you, White!”

“You’re a dead man, McCloskey!” White responded. If the wind hadn’t been so loud, I was sure I would have heard him laughing.

My rage built. I thought of Oregon. I thought of how I’d felt as all those people were coming to carve us up with their knives. I let the bloodlust take me over then. That blind, raging, animalistic fury to kill the other guy. It filled up inside me again, my adrenaline spiking in time with it. I was getting ready to point all that violence toward White.

I turned on the flashlight and lobbed it toward the drive. The trick worked. White must have thought I was running in that direction and started firing.

I rounded the tree and aimed my gun toward the sound of his shots. His muzzle sparked with each bullet. I couldn’t see him in the darkness but I aimed toward the flares and squeezed off two quick shots.

I thought I heard him yell, but then the lightning struck again. The thunder covered any noise he was making. I crossed back over to the other side of the tree line so I was close to the road again. I heard him fire twice more but couldn’t see the muzzle flash. Then he went quiet again as the storm raged.

He couldn’t be far. Around this tree or the next. I crept forward. Arms extended. Finger on the trigger. In the darkness I tried to see him. But it was pitch black.

When lightning lit up the ground, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. He had gotten to the road somehow. I’d been expecting him straight ahead, or on my right. I wasn’t ready for him on my left. Rather than try to get a shot off, I ducked as a bullet whizzed through the air near me. I did a quick army crawl and got around the other side of a maple tree and peered down the road.

All of a sudden, headlights came on and a car roared up the street. I smiled, thinking it was our driver. White stood in the cone of the headlights for a moment. I scrambled to my feet and brought my gun up. I stayed behind the trees so the headlights didn’t blind me and so I didn’t accidentally shoot our driver if I missed White. This way I had an angle on him.

I was just wondering why White wasn’t getting out of the car’s way, when he started frantically waving in my direction.

Later it would be obvious to me what he was doing, but in the moment the gesture was confusing. Why would he be telling the driver of the car there was somebody in the woods?

A hail of automatic gunfire erupted from the car. The bright flash gave me the split second notice I needed. I dropped to my knees as bullets chewed up the trees and ground around me. They were firing blind, but anybody with an automatic and a lot of ammo has a wide margin of error.

I stayed pinned to the ground. Over the sound and fury of the storm, I could just hear a car door slam before the headlights swiveled and my brain finally realized what was happening.

Someone had come to get White.

He had planned to escape
tonight
.

I poked my head up in time to see the car complete its K-turn. Then the driver stood on the gas pedal and they zoomed back down the drive.

I thought of charging down the road to shoot out the tires. But I was no expert marksman so my chances of hitting a speeding car’s tires from a hundred yards were slim and none. And more importantly, Manetti was shot.

Manetti was probably a hundred and thirty pounds, but she was all dead weight.

I hurried back up the drive as fast as I could carry her. White had shot her in the back and there was a lot of blood. She hadn’t been wearing a vest. When I’d found her in the darkness, she’d been breathing shallowly and didn’t respond to me. I picked her up and tossed her over my shoulder.

I made it back to the building. My back was screaming at me to get this one hundred and thirty pounds of unwelcome weight off my shoulder. One of the nurses inside saw me and pushed open the door.

“What happened?” she said.

“Manetti’s been shot. We need to help her now.”

“Stay here.”

In less than ten seconds, she came back with a gurney. I all but fell over but I managed to put Manetti down softly. Her normally olive complexion was now ghostly white. Her head lolled to the side.

“Manetti? Manetti? Agnes? Can you hear me?”

The nurse got between me and Manetti. “Sir, do you know her blood type?”

I shook my head. “No idea.”

They took Manetti away into one of the rooms. The power came back on as they wheeled her away. My hands were still shaking from the adrenaline.

The driver burst inside the building. His eyes locked on to me. We met each other halfway.

“Let’s go,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “First. What happened?”

“White shot her.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying. “He shot Manetti.”

“Is she okay?”

I saw no point in sugar-coating it. “It looks bad.”

The driver nodded, as if thanking me for the honest assessment. “Let’s go.”

Within ten minutes I knew it was useless. White and his crew just had too much of a head start. The driver called somebody to put out an APB on White. I couldn’t even give him a description of the car, other than to say it looked like a four door sedan.

We kept at it for as long as we could until finally the storm took over. After we were forced to double-back a few times due to flooding on major roads, we realized there was nothing more we could do. The driver got a call about the same time. The hurricane had hit right where they were expecting and was making its way toward us.

We had to head back.

***

“I told you not to come back!” Zane yelled as I stepped inside the building.

I was
this close
to decking him. But cooler heads prevailed for a change.

“White was breaking out of here either way. Now I need to talk to Alison.”

“We’re moving everybody into the basement,” Zane said.

“Why aren’t her parents here?” I said.

“Why do you think?” Zane asked. “She told them not to come.”

The urge to kill Zane lessened, but didn’t quite go away. “Did you take Manetti downstairs?”

Zane shook his head. “The nurses said they couldn’t move her. She’s staying up here.”

“I’ll be down in a minute. How do I get there?”

Zane told me and we parted ways. I backtracked to the room where they were keeping Manetti. One nurse wearing scrubs attended to her. They’d hooked Manetti up to the usual machines and were monitoring her heart rate, respiration, pulse ox, and blood pressure.

“Did you break any bags for her?” I said.

The nurse nodded. “We gave her a couple pints.”

“She going to make it?”

The nurse took too long to answer. “Maybe.”

“Come on.”

She looked at her patient. “Her pulse and blood pressure are low. The bullet nicked an artery. You’re lucky I worked in an ER out of nursing school. I tried to copy what I’d seen the doctors do…I did my best to sew it up but I’m no surgeon. If she lives she’ll probably lose the kidney.”

“Did somebody call an ambulance?”

“It’s not a good idea to move her now,” the nurse said. “You never know what could open that artery back up. Best to keep her stationary.”

“How about getting an ER doc out here?”

She nodded. “I asked Zane to put a call in.”

I sighed. “Need more blood?”

“Maybe. We don’t keep much around. It’s not exactly a hospital.”

Not exactly a prison either, I thought grimly.

I pushed up a sleeve and took the chair next to Manetti’s bed. “I’m O. Universal donor. Take as much as you need.”

She looked at me and nodded. “I’ll have to scrounge up the equipment. I’ll be back.”

The nurse gave me a thankful smile and left the room.

I sat there while Manetti breathed and kept on fighting. Her chest barely rose with each shallow breath, and it seemed to totally deflate with each exhale. With every breath, it was like she took in less air.

Her fingers were cold. They had only given her one blanket. I would have draped my sweatshirt over her, but it was still damp from being outside in the storm.

“Agnes, you’re one tough broad. You’re not going to die.”

She didn’t respond.

The nurse came back with a needle and IV line. There was no other bed in the room so I had to stay put in the chair, which wasn’t ideal. But she got me situated so my arm was elevated and then she needled me. I barely felt the stab, I was too worried about Manetti. The nurse taped it in place and looked me in the eye.

“Be back in a few.”

“Where are you going?”

“He shot somebody else too.” She shook her head.

“Is it bad?”

“He was shot in the calf and I think I’ve got it under control, but I have to be sure.”

“Okay.” I smiled. “What’s your name?”

“Deanna.”

“Thanks, Deanna.”

“Thank you, Eddie.”

“Can I ask for two favors?”

“Sure.”

I told her Manetti needed another blanket and where to find my tablet. I might as well do something useful while I was dripping blood.

Deanna left again so I was alone with Manetti and my brooding thoughts. The storm continued to rage outside, still building. The structure seemed to groan and shudder against the wind. Even if these walls caved in, I wasn’t about to leave Manetti’s side. Not unless I knew she was safe or not unless I knew I had a bead on White.

“He knew he was getting out tonight,” I said.

Manetti continued to breathe. I kept one eye on her vitals. Her pulse had dipped to forty, which I knew wasn’t good. The normal pulse rate was between sixty and one hundred.

It was the first I’d slowed my mind down enough to think about the facts and consider what they actually meant. White had
planned
on getting out tonight. There was a car waiting for him.

“How could he have planned it, though?” I asked Manetti, like she was engaged in a conversation with me and not actively dying in a hospital bed.

“How?” I asked again. “Unless he could be certain it was happening tonight.”

I followed that thought through to its logical conclusion. White had planned on getting out. He’d had a car waiting for him. His crew couldn’t just wait by the roadside indefinitely. A car out here, in the middle of nowhere, just hanging out by a remote research facility would have aroused suspicion. Which meant they’d been given a specific date and possibly time for his departure.

But how could White have planned to get out of his room when he needed to? His internet activity was monitored and he had no cell phone.

Deanna returned with another blanket for Manetti and my tablet for me. She checked my bag. “It’s really bad outside. This will be done in about ten minutes, after that I need you to get downstairs with everybody else.”

“I’m staying right here.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have time to argue with you. I’ve got another gunshot wound and a senior that might be concussed.”

“Whatever happens to me, it’s not your fault, Deanna.”

She nodded, seemingly accepting this. “I’ll be back.”

I went back to thinking about the car. White had planned on escaping tonight but how could he have counted on getting out of his room?

In my head, I went back to when I’d visited White. Granted, this place wasn’t a prison but they had two guards on White at all times and they didn’t have to enter the room to give him his food. Where was the second guard? And why did the guard open the door to give White his food, especially considering he didn’t have backup?

It didn’t make sense.

“White had help,” I said.

Manetti’s leg twitched and the skin around her eyes tightened.

“Hold on, Agnes. Just hold on.”

The ripple of pain passed and her jaw slackened.

I had to talk to the security team, but obviously wasn’t going anywhere while I was hooked up to a bag. I thought through the implications. Either White had gotten incredibly lucky because the guard was stupid, or White had help.

An inside job.

But who would let him out?

My first thought was Alison. She was unbalanced enough to do something really stupid like that.

But how would she have gotten the keys to unlock his door, and why would he have waited around for the guard if his door was unlocked? It was a long shot. But it was possible. Basically, I couldn’t rule anything out right now.

I still had a few minutes of bloodletting to kill, so I powered on the tablet. I couldn’t make any headway on White’s busting out till I talked to some people, so I might as well get back to work on something else in the interim.

I logged into the secure server and I opened the folder again. It displayed a list of the files I’d recently watched. At the top of the list was the video from the rape. Now that I’d met the woman, the video was even more horrifying. Melanie Crawford slept peacefully on her bed and—

It reminded me that Melanie Crawford probably knew White. And White knew Alison. And Alison had dreamed of Melanie Crawford. It was all connected somehow.

After watching the beginning, I was reminded that Alison’s image of the bedroom was actually incorrect. The night stand was on the other side of the bed in reality.

How could she get that detail wrong? When it came to the car accident, she’d gotten much of the minutiae almost exact.

Plus, she’d dreamed about Melanie Crawford’s bedroom before and gotten the layout
correct.

I went back to the shootout, fast-forwarding to get to the following dream sequence. After a minute of random shapes and colors, an image of a computer monitor appeared. I was back to where Alison was dreaming about checking her email. The cursor hovered over the latest new email. It opened. The image was too blurry to read the text or the name of the sender. And then the image shifted again to a very similar picture of Melanie’s bedroom, just from a slightly different angle. This was true stream of consciousness, Alison drifting from one thing to another—

I went back to the email.

She opened the new message and the cursor drifted down to the bottom of the screen. It hovered over an attachment to the email.

The cursor
blinked
, like she’d clicked the mouse.

I hadn’t seen that earlier. I’d just thought she was mentally drifting. But looking at this now, it seemed that wasn’t the case. She had opened an email, then clicked on the attachment, and the picture of Melanie’s bedroom had opened.

It was almost like somebody had emailed her the picture.

Melanie probably knew White.

What did that mean?

The wind was a constant roar now. Something heavy thumped the exterior wall outside our room.

I went back to my earlier conversation with Betty. About what dreams usually were. She had told me the prevailing theory was that we just replayed the day’s events or frequent, familiar occurrences in our minds. The things we did the most were what we dreamed about, which wasn’t that big of a shock. It had something to do with transitioning that organic data from short-term to long-term memory.

Checking email was a frequent thing for everybody, so it wasn’t a stretch for Alison to dream about it. But if the prevailing theory about dreams was correct, it also held that Alison was dreaming about a particular email she’d opened
frequently.

The picture of Melanie’s bedroom.

Melanie probably knew White.

White had planned on escaping tonight.

And where was the other guard?

Deanna came back into the room. “Okay, that’s enough for now. I’ll help you get into the basement.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You just gave me two pints. You need help.”