A moment later she heard the ceiling speaker crackle.
'How are you feeling?'
The voice of the hazmat man she'd first encountered.
'So far, so good,' Darby replied. 'Can you hear me, Sergeant-Major Glick?'
'I can hear you fine. Any problems breathing?'
She nodded. 'I think I fractured some ribs.'
'We'll give you a chest X-ray and then treat them when we get you to our hospital. What about nausea?'
'No. What's the army doing at BU?'
'Consulting.'
'On what?'
'Various governmental matters that don't concern you.'
'Then maybe you can tell me about the man I left in the woods. What's his condition?'
'I wish I could tell you.'
Darby swallowed. Her eyes narrowed. 'If you want my cooperation, you better drop the bullshit and — '
'No, you misunderstood me,' Glick said. 'I can't tell you anything about it because we didn't find him. We didn't find anyone in those woods, Miss McCormick, not a single person.'
16
Mark Rizzo started to drift back from the darkness of his mind only to encounter a new kind of darkness, one that was pitch black and smelled dank and musty. Something cold and hard and flat pressed up against the bare skin of his chest, thighs and arms. Every inch of his skin felt cold. Then he knew: he had been stripped of his clothes.
He turned his hand and his fingers felt rough stone.
A stone floor, damp and dirty.
Chilly air.
Dark air that smelled dank and musty.
No… Oh dear God in heaven please don't let this be true.
Adrenalin shot through his weary heart, flushing his skin and then… then it died. His muscles were unresponsive, and, while his mind felt thick and clogged, his thoughts sluggish, he had memories, fragments of them, and he remembered choking on the tear gas filling his bedroom and watching SWAT officers rush in and thinking, Thank God, oh thank God it's over. But one of the SWAT officers had a syringe and he remembered feeling the needle sink deep into his neck. Remembered trying to break free of the restraints binding him to the chair when he heard the first gunshot -
Mark Rizzo blinked the image away. He knew who had him now — and they were somewhere here in this pitch-black darkness. He could hear breathing.
A voice boomed through the darkness:
'Welcome home, Thomas.'
PART TWO
17
Darby lay propped up in the hospital bed with her hands folded behind her head, staring across the room at the clear Plexiglas door. Beyond it was a small, square-shaped area of spotless white tile. It covered the floor, walls and ceiling. The door in there was made of steel.
Two doors, both locked, both secured by keycard readers. You needed a card and a separate code for each door. Each person who came in here had a different set of codes. Some punched in three numbers. Others had six. One doc had seven.
She had stopped thinking about how to mount an escape. Even if she managed to grab a keycard from one of the docs or lab technicians who came in here to draw blood and then pump a cruiser-load of dope into her system, there was still the issue of the codes, and even with those there was the problem of whatever lay beyond these two doors. The BU Biomedical building, where she was currently quarantined, no doubt had top-notch security. A stolen keycard (and the codes, don't forget the damn codes) would get her only so far; they wouldn't open whatever doors separated her from the outside world. Then there was the staff to deal with, and guards — army boys, probably.
Would they shoot her? Unlikely. Would they Mace her or use something like a Taser? Most definitely.
Escaping wasn't an option.
Her thoughts shifted to the reasons why she wanted to leave here: the staff refused to let her use the phone to call someone on the outside. They refused to bring her a newspaper (although they brought her celebrity rag mags in droves and said she could read anything she wanted; she had asked for, and was given, Jane Austen's complete oeuvre). The TV in here had cable but they had blocked out all the news stations. They refused to tell her what she had been infected with and why they kept drawing her blood and shooting her full of drugs. Orders, they said, from the man sitting high on the mountaintop, Sergeant-Major Glick.
Even more infuriating was the fact that no one would tell her when she'd be released. She was still showing no sign of infection. No nausea. No problem swallowing and no problem breathing. Well, it did hurt to breathe, but that was caused by her ribs. There was a lot of talking about her lying down and resting, and for the first few days she had complied.
Not one single symptom and yet they were keeping her imprisoned here, and refusing to explain why.
She wondered what time it was. There wasn't a clock in here.
A lot of things weren't in here. A lot of things.
That was going to change. Right now.
Darby yanked back the rough white sheets and scratchy wool blue blanket, sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She didn't hop off, just sat with her fingers digging into the edge of the mattress, waiting for the dizziness to pass. It always took its sweet goddamn time about leaving, and when it finally did she had to deal with how her head felt afterwards, this throbbing cement block on her shoulders that kept screaming at her to lie back down — a side effect, she assumed, from the pain meds. The shotgun blast had fractured not one but three ribs, tearing a considerable amount of cartilage. Thankfully, the damage ended there. Her lungs and spleen had been spared.
The dope they were giving her, though, had another, more serious side effect: it clouded her memories. Some were fuzzy; others were, well, black holes.
She had no problem recalling the details of everything she'd seen and heard inside the Rizzo house. And she remembered, quite clearly, what had happened in the woods behind the old couple's home and what had happened after she'd been locked inside the mobile trailer's stainless-steel quarantine chamber, bumping into the smooth, cold walls when the trailer got moving, driving her, the elderly couple and their grandson all the way back to Boston's BU Biomedical lab. She remembered being escorted inside some sort of plastic-looking tube and into a painfully bright room of white tile, where two women dressed in biohazard gear stood by a gurney. One gave her another injection as the other informed her she had to go through a second decontamination process, this one more thorough. The sedative would make her relax and help with the pain. Both women removed her scrubs and strapped her down into the cold gurney. The last memory Darby had was one of staring up at the ceiling's humming fluorescent lights, watching as they whisked past her, blurring together, growing brighter and brighter.
Whatever had happened after that was lost.
When she woke up, alone, in the hospital bed where she now sat, the first thing she noticed was her skin. It had been scrubbed raw and gave off, along with her hair, some sort of medicinal smell that brought to mind the disinfectant and germicidal solutions used in funeral homes. Nasty odours used in treating the dead.
She wasn't dead, or even hovering close to it, and yet they were keeping her locked up inside this quarantine chamber straight out of a sci-fi movie: blue-padded walls, floor and ceiling; stainless-steel sink and a private toilet and shower stall. Anything that left the room — her hospital scrubs, magazines, food scraps and paper plates, cups and plastic utensils — was wrapped and sealed inside a bright red biohazard bag.
The dizziness, at least the worst of it, had passed. Darby slid off the bed and made her way across the padded floor in her bare feet, hearing the now familiar mechanical whine coming from the pair of security cameras turning to track her. These cameras monitored her movements, even at night when she went to use the toilet.