The Scrubs (4 page)

“You said, ‘at first.’
 
What changed?”

“Jeter.
 
During the course of some early tests, he produced a small Rift.
 
The researchers saw a niche.
 
They believed they had a unique way to study Jeter’s mind.
 
They could physically enter his psychosis and discover what made his fucked clock of a brain tick.
 
I bet a couple of those eggheads over there thought they were in for a Nobel or three.”
 
O’Keefe snorted a derisive laugh.
 
“But Jeter being Jeter, he’s turned everything on its head.
 
Now, the team here doesn’t know what to think.”

“Why?”

“Well, the possibilities are endless.
 
We may not just be looking the working mind of a sociopath, but at the secrets to time travel or inter-dimensional travel.
 
It’s all beyond me.
 
All I know is that it’s quantum leap technology.”

Time travel…inter-dimensional travel…quantum leap technology, it was bollocks.
 
Cady didn’t believe a word of it and he had the feeling that O’Keefe didn’t either.
 
He was just talking the talk.
 
This seemed to be a dog and pony show for Cady’s benefit.
 
What was O’Keefe’s crack about telling Saunders that they’d be online before the end of the year?
 
There was something O’Keefe wasn’t telling him.

“You don’t see it that way, do you?” Cady asked.
 
“Jeter means something else to you entirely.”

O’Keefe smiled approvingly.
 
“You’re right.
 
I don’t just see an opportunity for science.”

Cady had been under O’Keefe’s tutelage for only a few months, but the governor’s reputation preceded him.
 
O’Keefe saw prisoners as resources to be used—and abused.
 
He volunteered his prison for every whacked out research program going and for his pioneering spirit, he possessed the highest rate of inmate fatalities of any prison in the European Union.

“If not for science,” Cady said, “then what?”

“Entertainment.”

“Excuse me?” Cady said, not believing what he’d just heard.

“If we can get the Rift under control, it could be the greatest virtual reality game the world has ever seen.
 
Imagine it, you get to go inside someone else’s reality and go head-to-head with it.
 
Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, they would be history.”

“But you’ve only got Jeter.”

“Not for long.
 
If we can master his powers and find others like him, we can replicate their minds artificially and create simulations based on their thought patterns.
   
We’re looking at a multi-billion pound business.”

“What kind of game?”

“We’re talking about Jeter.
 
What kind of game do you think?”

“The worst kind.”

“And those eighteen to twenty-four year olds would love it.”

“You said Keeler was a guinea pig.
 
Why have you really sent him in there?”

“To see if he can survive.”

“So this has nothing to do with finding Lefford and Allard?”

O’Keefe shook his head.
 
“I doubt they’re alive.
 
We lost contact with them almost immediately.
 
At this point, we’re trying to establish telecommunication links inside the Rift.
 
Once we achieve that then we’ll be set.”

“How close are you to achieving that?”
 

“A couple of months off.
 
We’ll probably have to send in a couple more inmates.”

“But how far are you from getting Jeter under some form of control?” Cady asked.
 

O’Keefe sagged.
 
“That part is going to take considerable time.”

“So what are Keeler’s chances of making it back?”

“With the brain Jeter’s got,” O’Keefe said more to himself than to Cady.
 
“It’s got to be slim to nothing.
 
It’s a slaughterhouse in there.”
 

Chapter Three

The Rift

The air smelled wrong on the other side of the Rift.
 
Keeler couldn’t put his finger on it.
 
It didn’t possess a smell as such, but when he inhaled, an unpleasantness clung to the inside of his head.
 
Breathing through his mouth didn’t help either.
 
The irregular air had substance and it coated his tongue.
 
He waved his hand through the air and it came away damp.
 
Whatever tainted the air had an immediate effect.
 
Thick and cloying, it attacked his respiratory system.
 
His lungs struggled to process it, but it had no problem reaching his brain.
 
It’s heady quality made him unsure of his footing.
 
He felt like he was sloshing around inside a bottle of that crap O’Keefe had made him drink.
 

Keeler held up a shielding hand to stare into the sky and the hazy brightness.
 
He should have been staring into the harsh afternoon sun, but there was no sun.
 
This world seemed to be lit everywhere at once.
 
Shadows couldn’t exist here.
 
This is getting more Alice in Wonderland by the second
, he thought.

Voices from the North Wing faded.
 
Keeler whirled.
 
The Rift was still there, but it no longer reflected the goings on in the North Wing.
 
The opening he’d stepped through was now a shimmering haze distorting the view of the open countryside.
 
He didn’t like to think he was on a one-way ticket.
 
He guessed, even believed, he had only to step back through the haze to end up back in the Scrubs.
 
He thought about trying his theory out, but there wasn’t much point.
 
If he tried, O’Keefe would only shove him back through.
 
And for all he knew, stepping through the Rift might throw him into in another world.
 
He’d screwed himself over.

He tugged the mobile phone off his belt and switched it on.
 
No reception.
 
It wasn’t a surprise.
 
He didn’t have high hopes for the camcorder, but tried it anyway.
 
He switched it on and filmed a three hundred and sixty degree panning shot of fields stretching out in all directions.
 
He stopped the recording and played it back.
 
Through the viewfinder he watched thirty seconds of static.
 
What does that mean?
he thought.
 
He tossed the useless electronics.

“Now what?” he asked himself.

He was inside Jeter’s warped brain without a map looking for two convicts.
 
In God’s name, what did O’Keefe think he was going to find?
 
It was a farce.

Having no clue where Lefford and Allard could be hiding out, Keeler had everywhere to go and nowhere to start.
 
He surveyed faded green field after faded green field.
 
They reminded him of boyhood summer holidays spent in the Cotswolds, endless days spent following nothing but the end of his nose.
 
In those days, he had believed he could be anything.
 
A career criminal had never been one of those choices.
 
Not that he could remember what he’d wanted to be back then.
 
He just knew he’d never wanted to be a killer.

He shook off the ideas filling his head.
 
He wasn’t a boy and this wasn’t the Cotswolds.
 
He trudged towards the only landmark he could see, a small enclosure of trees about two miles distant.
 

Thoughts of Jeter, Lefford and Allard’s crimes reminded him of his own.
 
Why did that screw have to bring up the kid?
 
He hadn’t meant to kill Tim Mitchell.
 
It was an accident, an armed robbery gone bad.
 
Christ, if he could take it back, he would.
 
Even now, three years into his stretch, not many nights went by without him replaying events.
 
How had it gone so bad so quickly?

The
smash ‘n’ grab
should have gone as it had time and time before.
 
Keeler conducted himself no differently from the other six successful robberies.
 
He raided only bank sub-branches because they weren’t as securely maintained as the more important high street branches.
 
The places were as easy to knock over as a house of cards.
 
On-staff security was non-existent, and the alarm systems were a couple of generations off from state of the art.
 
They were so simple he worked them alone, leaving the car running on the street.
 
The Brentford sub-branch of Lloyd’s Bank should have been no different, but Tim Mitchell changed that when he shot at Keeler.

Tim hadn’t possessed a cap gun or one that fired a cork fastened to the barrel with a piece of string like Keeler had adored when he was a kid.
 
No, little Tim’s parents had bought him a replica 9mm pistol that played a recording of an actual gunshot when the trigger was pulled.
 
In the confusion of the raid, with the security alarm wailing, Keeler had thought he was being shot at and he’d swung around with the sawn-off and opened up on the seven year-old, removing his grin and most of his face with the contents of a single shell.
 
The boy fell back, bringing down a blood splattered leaflet carousel bearing the bank’s black horse logo.
 

With Tim’s mother screaming a scream that could only be replicated in his nightmares, Keeler had stood there wishing he could suck the buckshot back into the shotgun until a customer pounced on him.
 
A man dressed in a bland Marks and Spencer suit came at Keeler with hungry hands eager to tear Keeler’s head from his shoulders.
 
The man’s middle-of-the-road attire clashed with the ferocity of his attack as he brought Keeler down.
 
Although numb from nearly decapitating the boy, Keeler fought back to save his own sorry life.
 
He turned the shotgun on Mr.
 
Marks and Spencer and fired, emptying the second cartridge into the man’s chest.
 
Bits of the man struck the foam ceiling tiles and Keeler watched the blood drip from the ceiling while he waited for the cops to come.

Although an accident, Keeler couldn’t erase what he’d done and he pleaded guilty to everything the prosecution wanted to throw at him.
 
He accepted his punishment and said thank you when they were finished.
 
There were some things you didn’t fight.

“Tim, why couldn’t you have been at school that day?” Keeler murmured to himself and blinked away the memory.

Reaching the wooded area, Keeler weaved his way between the trees to discover a mini-oasis.
 
The trees ringed a crystal blue pond.
 
The tranquil spot drained away Keeler’s tension.
 
His head still throbbed from the absinthe O’Keefe had given him and the water looked tempting.
 
He dropped to his knees at the pond’s edge and sloshed water over his face, hoping to dislodge his headache.

The water, like everything else in Jeter’s brain damaged world, was wrong.
 
It was water and it wasn’t.
 
It was oily and greasy to the touch, but it flowed through Keeler’s fingers and off his face like water.
 
It may not have been tap quality, but it was no less refreshing and Keeler dunked his head in the pond.
 
His vision failed to cut through the murk.
 
Particles drifted by, tugged along by an unseen current, glinting in the dark waters.
 
Just out of range, something more substantial glided towards him.
 
He squinted to make out what it was, but he didn’t recognize it until a hand brushed against his face.
 
He gasped, sucking in a mouthful of water.
 
A fetid odor filled his nose—not the sourness of stagnant water, but the rankness of bad meat.
 
He recoiled from the pond, collapsed onto his back then staggered away on all fours.
 

A young woman, no more than nineteen and naked, bobbed face down on the surface of the pool, a languid arm outstretched and her head turned to one side with her blonde hair trailing behind her.
 
Her exposed face had been eroded, chewed, clawed and torn away exposing bone and raw muscle.
 
The wounds were old, but blood drizzled into the water as if they were new.
 
It flowed no more than a foot from the wound before dissipating into nothing.
 
The teenager ran adrift on the bank.

She didn’t have much choice.
 
Other bodies, all marred and in worse condition than the beautiful girl, bubbled up from the center of the pond and floated to the surface.
 
The force of subsequent carcasses pushed the first ones out to the edge of the pool.
 
Soon, they choked the pond.
 
Within moments, it was impossible to see the water under the weight of corpses.