The Mesmerized (23 page)

Alec coughed in the pungent atmosphere, then
steadied himself by clutching her shoulder as he slid off the bike.
“Where was Dr. McCoy?”

“That tent near the ambulance. I’ll show
you.” Kicking her leg over the bike, she dismounted and rubbed her
hands against her thighs to warm them.

“You can stay here if you like,” Alec
said.

“No, it’s fine. Plus, the cold appears to be
slowing you down a little.”

“I have pins in this leg. I’m not going to
say I don’t feel every single one of them right now.”

Minji didn’t actually want to see the dead
woman again, but Alec needed her help. She was a little unnerved by
how quickly she was acclimating to the chaotic new world, but she
supposed it was her nature to adapt to survive. Most of her life
she’d been doing exactly that before Jake and the girls had brought
stability to it.

Trudging toward the fake Bridge of Sighs
that sprawled over the drive, Minji shivered in her lightweight
jacket. It was growing colder. How much of that other world was
leaking into this one? And exactly what
was
the other world?
Another dimension of some sort? Reflecting on the images and sounds
she’d witnessed during the visions that accompanied her blindness
in the first attacks, she wondered if maybe Simone and Jesse had
both been right in their assessments that they’d seen heaven or
hell. Though she wasn’t inclined to believe the scientists had
actually opened a path to the afterlife, Ava’s possession and the
mesmerized were clearly unnatural. It made her innately
uncomfortable to even consider that the event was supernatural, but
it would be foolish not to consider the possibility.

“When I came out of The Venetian with the
girls, the police escorted me over here.” Minji pointed to the tent
they were approaching. “Dr. McCoy claimed to be from the CDC, but
there was just something off about the whole scenario.”

“She definitely wasn’t CDC. That was just a
cover story. I can imagine she was very excited to find people who
were immune.”

“Like you are?” Minji sounded a little
bitchier than she wanted, but the weight of what needed to be done
to save everyone was burdensome on her mind and heart.

“I’m sorry to drag you into this,” Alec
answered giving her a genuinely sorrowful look. “If I could do this
myself, I would.”

Minji shrugged. “It is what it is.”

The heavy soles of her boots crunched on the
debris littering the walk. Bits of glass, rocks, and shrubbery were
mixed in with a thick layer of ash. The world was eerily muted
except for the distant roar and crackle of fire. Returning to the
tent where she’d witnessed the death of the scientist was
particularly unpleasant. She suffered a pang of guilt. The last
words the scientist heard before dying was Minji and Arthur arguing
with her. Remorse sought to infect her, but Minji realized she
truly didn’t have time to deal with the emotions wrapped up in the
event. If she even let a tiny bit seep through her defenses, she
might collapse. There was too much to process and not enough
time.

“Here,” Minji said ducking into the tent.
She pointed to the figure lying next to the toppled table.

“I’m going to have to open her hazmat suit.
This is going to be very bad,” Alec warned her, carefully lowering
himself to one knee and awkwardly extending the other to one
side.

Minji wasn’t sure if there was anything that
could faze her after the last twenty-four hours. All she’d
experienced had inoculated her to the horrors of the world. Or
maybe she was just in shock. Whether she was developing a thick
skin or emotionally numb, it was futile to attempt not to watch
Alec at his gruesome task. Curiosity, no matter how morbid, would
win out, so Minji gave up and squatted next to Alec.

“I need to get to her actual I.D., not the
cover story one,” Alec explained, pointing to the fake CDC badge.
He started to open the suit, flinching when the first puffs of
putrid air escaped it. “It should be somewhere on her person.”

The smell hit Minji a few seconds later. She
swallowed the bile creeping up her throat and adjusted her
facemask, but the thin white mask couldn’t keep the smell at bay.
Her throat burned from stomach acid and her eyes watered. Pushing
aside her revulsion, she helped Alec pull open the hazmat suit.
Beneath the bulky suit the woman was wearing blue trousers and a
pink blouse. Around her throat was a gold necklace with a Mobius
strip pendant. These little details of the dead scientist’s lost
life made the woman’s death somehow even more terrible.

“I’ll do it,” Minji volunteered. “Let her
have some dignity in death.”

Alec inclined his head. “All right.” He
stood with some difficulty and leaned heavily on his cane.

Pretending to be made of stone and steel, a
trick from her childhood when kids picked on her at school, Minji
reached into the suit and skimmed her hand along the dead woman’s
body searching for pockets. In the front right-side of the woman’s
pants, Minji found a small aluminum wallet and pulled it free. When
she saw the purple metallic case with a unicorn sticker pasted on
the lid, her resolve slipped and a soft whimper escaped her lips.
The sticker instantly reminded her of something Ava would do. It
was so easy to imagine a child pressing it onto their mother’s
wallet. Dr. McCoy had been a mother and now she was gone. Where was
her child? Was that child alive? Dead? And when this was all over,
would the child be an orphan?

Straightening, Minji popped the case open
and immediately saw a small picture booth photo of Dr. McCoy and a
little boy. The tiny glimpse into the life of the woman who now lay
dead at her feet struck deep into Minji’s psyche. As a mother, she
wanted nothing more than to save her children and their father so
they could be whole again. But Dr. McCoy no longer had that hope.
Her child was without a parent, and perhaps a partner was now
without their spouse. Reverently, Minji touched the small
photo.

“Minji?”

“I’m fine,” she answered, then dug her teeth
into the inside of her bottom lip so the pain could steady her
emotions. “I was just wondering about her. She must have been so
excited to find me and Arthur. She must have thought we were
salvation for her little boy.”

“You are,” Alec assured her. “We’re going to
beat this thing.”

“If we can find a way in.” The case
contained credit cards, a driver’s license for the State of Nevada,
and a blank white card with a strange holographic inset on one
side. “Is this it?”

Alec took the card, flipped it over, then
nodded. “Yes. This is it.”

“But there’s no name or anything on it?
Shouldn’t it say the Department of such-and-such?”

“Actually, no. The facility is technically
owned by the Department of Energy, but various agencies rent it
out. Whoever is leasing the first and second facility would just be
known as ‘the tenant.’”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Most likely she’s employed by a company
with Department of Defense funds behind it.”

“So, you both worked for ‘the tenant’ and
had no idea who it was?”

“She probably knew, but I was just security.
I sat and watched monitors all day. Miles of fences. It was
incredibly boring.”

“Until yesterday.”

“I would've rather it stayed boring.”

“Me, too.”

Rotating slowly in a circle, Alec
scrutinized the area. “There should be tablets that they used
around here.”

“She had one. I remember.”

Minji crawled on her knees to the jumble of
items from the table Dr. McCoy had struck when she’d fallen,
thrusting away the emotions battering against her self-control.
This was not the time to give into them. They’d have to wait until
she’d either succeeded or failed. She shoved her dreads out of her
face and tucked the ends into her jacket pocket so she could
see.

“We’ll have to get another card off someone
else from the facility. The doors only open for one person at a
time. If more than one person attempts to enter, there are security
measures we don’t want to deal with.”

“Sounds very James Bondish,” Minji
mused.

“Well, yes. It does.” Alec sorted through
the items on the table that was still standing.

Finally spotting the tablet with the thick
gray plastic case, Minji exhaled in relief. “Okay, got it.” She
automatically swiped the screen to see if it still worked and was
rewarded with a black screen with a large white barcode.

“Great, it's working. This one is broken,”
he said, nudging another tablet with his cane. The glass was
shattered.

“How does this help us?” Minji asked.

“Well, believe it or not, it has all the
safety protocols for the experiment. They were downloaded to the
tablets of the second team so they could gain entry to the first
facility.”

Rolling her eyes, Minji gave him an
incredulous look. “Really? They have instructions on them?”

“It’s encrypted, of course. It’s not like
you or anyone else without the passcodes could get into it. But I
was given that information, so...” Alec lifted a shoulder. “It does
sound a bit simplistic, but they were scrambling.”

“No, it makes sense. I guess I’ve seen too
many movies,” Minji said, glad for the simplicity. She handed Alec
the tablet and he took it was a reverence that was unexpected.

“This is how we save the world,” he said in
awe. “It’s all right here.”

“I guess we’re lucky that the second team
was reporting in when the event expanded so that the people in
power knew where to send you.”

“I wasn’t planning to seek you out at the
medical center until I had the accident. The car wreck was real,
and really fortunate. It made me find you.”

“Because I’m completely immune.”

“Exactly.” Alec shoved the tablet into a
pocket inside his jacket and steadied himself on his cane. “We
should hurry.”

Somehow it felt wrong to leave the hazmat
suit open, so Minji took the time to close it while Alec limped
over to the next body. This time he searched it himself.

“Not high enough security clearance,” he
called out, then limped to the next body.

With gritted teeth, Minji searched another
person lying near the ambulance. She found a card in a wallet, but
when she flipped it over it had a different holographic symbol on
the back. “This isn’t it?”

“No. It has to look like Dr. McCoy’s. I’ll
check inside the van.”

Minji hurried over to the next body and
started to search while Alec approached one of the black vehicles.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him hesitate when he heard
the thumping coming from within.

“We heard them, but didn’t let them out
yesterday,” Minji guiltily admitted.

“You couldn’t have anyway. You need one of
these.” Alec pressed on the door near the handle and a small panel
popped open. He slipped Dr. McCoy’s card into the slot, then slid
open the side door.

Two men stumbled out, faces covered in dried
blood. Their noses, lips and chins were a mess from the battering
they had endured when trying to escape. They were dressed in hazmat
suits, too, but their hoods were flipped back and the clear
facemasks glinted in the dim sunlight. Immediately, they surged
toward Minji, mouths twisting in that scarily familiar way. The
older black man with white hair cocked his head to stare at Minji
while the shorter white man struggled to see her through his blood
soaked bangs.

Feeling dizzy and a little sick, Minji
stepped away from the men, putting a space between them. “Alec, you
need to hurry.”

“I just need a second card to get you in,
too. The doors only open for one person at a time.”

“Yeah, I remember.” The men stumbled after
Minji, their mouths twisting and flexing in strange ways. “Alec,
seriously, we need to wrap this up.”

“Moooooo...” the men chorused.

The vacant eyes tracked her every movement.
With every step she took, they followed in her wake. Minji found
herself uneasily circling the vehicles, trying to keep distance
between her and the two men.

“I’m still looking,” Alec replied, hurrying
to the next black van.

One of the mesmerized men, the taller one,
reached for Minji. “Mooooo...”

“Alec, find one now!”

Minji tripped over a body and fell against
an ambulance door. It banged shut and sent her careening off
balance. She landed on her hip with a thud and rolled onto her
backside. The two battered men bent over her, hands seeking to grip
her body. She was afraid of the mesmerized not because of their
terrible countenance, but the thing staring out from their eyes.
She knew it was watching her. She knew it wanted her.

“Alec!”

Crab-walking backwards on her hands and
feet, Minji eluded the grasping hands of the mesmerized men. She
thumped into something hard, yet fleshy, and cried out in fright. A
mesmerized woman, dressed just like the men, seized her shoulders.
Alec must have freed her from the other vehicle.

“Moooooo...”

Going limp, Minji slumped to the ground, the
woman’s clutching digits losing traction on the leather jacket.
Minji scooted away from the three transfixed people before
clambering to her feet.

“Alec!”

Stepping out from the shadow of the van,
Alec raised another card. “I got it.”

“We need to go,” Minji said stalking toward
him.

“They’re harmless,” he said, giving her a
bewildered look.

“Are they?” Minji speedily climbed onto the
bike and started it up.

Giving the mesmerized trio staggering after
Minji a thoughtful look, Alec joined her on the bike. “I’ve never
seen them so agitated.”

“You’ve never seen
it
this agitated,”
Minji corrected.

He leaned into her back, his arm tensed
around her waist, and the bike lurched forward with a loud roar,
leaving a streak of rubber on the asphalt.