The Dark Rift: Redemption (29 page)

“Do you think she’s lied to us all the way through?” Chuck asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Jodie said. “Can you help me get her on the gurney? We can cover her up so no one knows what’s going on . . . at least not until it’s already too late for them.”

Chuck picked Hana up, placed her on the gurney and pulled a sheet over her head.

“What’ve we got for weapons?” Jodie asked. “I hope there’s more than syringes in here.”

“Too late to find out,” Chuck said, gesturing toward the hallway where footsteps and voices echoed.

Jodie pushed herself against the wall and grabbed the only thing she could reach to arm herself with, which was a metal bedpan. Chuck flattened himself against the wall on the other side of the door and waited. The door opened and two hazmat suit-clad men entered.

“Hi, guys,” Jodie said.

They both turned in her direction, their backs to Chuck. Jodie heard the crack of their skulls being pulverized as Chuck slammed their heads together, the grey matter of their brains visible inside the plastic shields covering their faces. She held the bedpan in front of her and threw up into it.

“I’m sorry,” Chuck said. “I didn’t realize that would happen.”

Jodie dropped the bedpan. “Maybe a little less flair next time, okay, Chuck?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, dragging the bodies into the corner next to a cabinet. “Let’s go.”

Evan and Fester hoisted the dirt bike into the van. “Never know when this could come in handy,” Evan said. “Here, put this on,” he said, handing Fester a hazmat suit. He slid one on and grabbed two facemasks, handing one to Fester. “Okay, let’s go knock on the front door and see who answers.”

Evan drove down the ramp and followed the road toward the fence. He turned where it led into the main part of Area 51. Approaching the guardhouse, he could see it was unoccupied. As they moved closer, the whereabouts of the guard became apparent. His body, torn into a half dozen pieces, was scattered from his post, all the way across the two-lane road. “Don’t look, Fester, my boy,” Evan said. “Nothing to be gained by that.”

“What coulda done that?” Fester asked. “One of those things? They didn’t seem that strong. They were, like, falling apart.”

Evan shook his head. “I’m not sure, but I have a feeling it’s not from the neighborhood.”

“You mean an alien?” Fester asked.

“Don’t know. Could be. I hope we don’t find out.” Evan took a deep breath and removed his facemask and tossed it in the back of the van. “I don’t think we’ll need our masks anymore. There’s probably no one left to sneak up on.”

Fester slid his mask off and threw it next to Evan’s.

“The black helicopters,” Evan said, “Did you see them when you came in?”

“Yeah,” Fester said. “They were way off to the northeast. You know, in the direction of Las Vegas.” Fester paused for a moment, then spoke. “You don’t think they’ll make it that far, do you?”

“I think the proverbial cat is out of the bag. That’s what I think,” Evan said. “Are you ready? We’re at our destination.” Evan parked the van and got out, joining Fester, who was already at the door. “You took a gun from the convenience store, then, did you?”

Fester shifted back and forth on his feet. “Uh, yeah, I did.”

“You’d best get it out. We might need it,” Evan said, knowing Fester could handle a gun and would follow through if he needed to. Evan opened the door and walked inside the building. It was nothing more than a large, modified trailer, nondescript and grey inside. Only, it had been painted with the blood of what looked like two women and a man, who’d undoubtedly been surprised by an extraterrestrial visitor earlier in the day. The sight was absolute carnage, with body parts and blood spattered across the room. Fester clamped his hand over his mouth and Evan did the same. The metallic smell of blood made him want to gag.

“Why are we here?” Fester asked, looking paler by the second.

“Cameras. Security cameras,” Evan said, moving past Fester and stepping over a leg covered in sheer panty hose. “In here,” he motioned to the room in front of him.

Part of a man’s arm lay over the chair in the security office. Evan pushed the chair aside and stood at the desk, punching buttons. As he did, a different view within Area 51 appeared. On the fifth button, images of a group of people in hazmat suits appeared. In back of them, a spacecraft appeared to hover over the ground. A dozen or so cars were lined up, ready to be loaded onto the ship.

“That’s where the action is,” Evan said. “I’ll bet you anything that Jodie and Officer Wending are somewhere near there.”

“How do we get there?” Fester asked, his voice muffled by the hand he had clamped over his mouth and nose.

“Unfortunately, another elevator,” Evan said. “Are you up for it?”

“Yeah,” Fester said. “Those are the people I wanted to find, anyway.”

“Let’s go, then,” Evan said, leading the way out of the room. “On the way, you can tell me what your plans are for them.” Evan wondered if Fester would really exact the kind of punishment they deserved. In the end, he knew he would have to try to stop the boy from killing anyone. After all, Fester wouldn’t know that taking revenge carried a very heavy price, maybe more than anyone should have to pay. Evan picked up an automatic weapon lying near a dead guard and checked for ammunition. He looked up to see Fester already cradling another in his arms.

“I’m ready,” Fester said.

That could be the understatement of the century, Evan thought. He feared what kind of rage Fester would unleash on the Gypsum guards. “Just be careful, my boy. We don’t want anyone of our group to get caught in the crossfire.”

* * *

Jodie and Chuck peeked out the door of the ship, watching the Gypsum team assemble supplies.

“Jodie, before I was locked in that room, I found cryotubes,” Chuck said. “Some of them could have been occupied. Each tube had a panel on the front with numbers on a display. I don’t know what they meant or if anyone was even in them, but we’d better go and have a look before we do anything else.”

Jodie felt like her head was spinning. “Do you think Mei could be in one of those?” she asked, already moving back toward the medical area.

Chuck shook his head. “I couldn’t see inside. I’m sorry. I wanted to find out if she was there before telling you about them. I wanted to rip the door off of one, but I didn’t know what that would do if a person was inside.”

“We’ll have to find a way to wake up Hana and ask her,” Jodie said.

They approached the room they’d just left, hearing metal clanging against the floor. Jodie looked inside, seeing Hana crawling along the floor, knocking a chair over as she tried to drag herself.

“Whoa, there,” Jodie said, grabbing Hana and helping her to a seated position. “Chuck, let’s get her into the other room.”

Hana made an attempt at sitting by herself, but fell to the side. “Why did you do this to me? I was trying to help,” she said.

“Because, Hana, people like you shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions for other people. Right now, you’re going to show us how to open those cryotubes in the next room.”

Hana’s head bobbed and she appeared to fall asleep.

“Let me carry her,” Chuck said, bending down and picking her up. While he was bent over, Jodie noticed something disturbing. The skin on his back was shredded.

“Chuck, your back,” Jodie said. “Does it hurt?”

“No, not really,” he said. “Feels kind of good to get rid of it. It’s like a suit that never fit well.”

Deciding they didn’t have time to talk about what was happening to him, Jodie looked outside the door and waved Chuck out. They moved to the next room, where Chuck set Hana down next to the cryotubes. Jodie put her face up against the glass panel and tried to see in. Hana made an unintelligible noise and kicked at Jodie’s leg. “What is it?” Jodie asked, bending down near Hana’s face.

“On the panel . . . press the button with the bulb symbol. You’ll be able to see inside,” she said, voice thick and slurred.

Chuck ran down to the far end of the row of tubes. Jodie started at the other end. She held her breath as she pushed the button Hana described and the face of a middle-aged man was illuminated. She pushed the button again, sending him back into darkness, and moved on to the next tube, finding a woman in her twenties. “Who are these people, Hana?”

“Genetics team,” she mumbled. “They volunteered.”

“More like they didn’t want to get wiped out with the rest of us,” Jodie muttered, moving to the third tube. Reaching for the button, she heard Chuck gasp.

“She’s here,” he said.

Jodie ran over to the tube, seeing Mei’s face suspended in liquid, a tube protruding from her mouth. Her eyes were taped shut. “Oh, God,” Jodie gasped. “What did they do to you? How do we get you out of this thing?”

“No. Can’t do that,” Hana said.

Jodie moved down by Hana. “Tell us what to do, Hana, and we’ll get you out of here, too.”

“The tube . . . has to go through a sequence. Takes twenty-four hours.” Hana’s eyes closed and she nodded off to sleep.

“Shit,” Jodie said. “We’ll have to take the tube with us. How are we going to get both of them out without Gypsum seeing us?”

“I think we only have one choice,” Chuck said. “It’s time to thin the herd, don’t you agree?”

Jodie thought that would be suicide, even for Chuck. “There’s too many. You’ll never be able to handle that many.” No sooner had the words come from her mouth when the sound of rapid gunfire made Jodie jump. She ran after Chuck as he sprinted from the room. Not able to match his pace, she finally caught up with him as he stopped by the ramp. “What’s going on?”

“You’re not gonna believe this,” Chuck said. “It’s Fester. He’s got them all pinned down in back of those racks of supplies. What is he doing here? He’s gonna get himself killed.”

A spray of bullets ricocheted across the room as Evan ran toward the ramp.

“Oh, my God, that’s my father,” Jodie said.

He ran toward her and his face lit up as his eyes met hers. Then, his expression changed abruptly and she saw his chest explode in a spray of blood and bone. Before he hit the ground, he threw his gun ahead of him, toward her. He landed on the ramp, the sound sickening as his face smacked into the hard metal. Jodie grabbed for the gun.

“No. Let me,” Chuck said. “I’ll take care of them. All of them. You help your father.” Chuck crept over to Evan and dragged him up the ramp, closer to Jodie and out of the line of fire.

Jodie tore part of her t-shirt off and pressed it down on the wound on her father’s chest. From what she could see, the bullet had gone clean through, breaking his collarbone as it exited. The wound on his head was another matter and she would be surprised if he didn’t have a severe concussion.

Chuck grabbed the automatic weapon and ran down the ramp, bullets shredding his clothes and hitting his skeleton, making a thudding noise as they pelted his metal frame. Then, he was on them, holding his finger on the trigger until each and every man and woman in front of him was transformed into a mass of blood and gore.

Gunfire erupted from another side of the installation. Jodie looked over, seeing Fester pinned down in a corner by a group firing at him. Chuck threw the gun down and ran toward them, the skin on his body pulverized by the impact of hundreds of bullets. Fester tossed his gun to Chuck and he unloaded it into the crowd of Gypsum guards, reducing them to near liquid form. Finally, the weapon was empty and he dropped it to the floor.

“Fester, what are you doing here?” he asked. Jodie watched as he walked over to the boy and hugged him, then pushed him away to arm’s length. “You could’ve been killed.”

“I . . . I just thought you might need help,” Fester said, smiling. “And, I brought you these.” Fester pulled out the box of Three Musketeers bars. “Are you okay? You’re … well, you’re leaking.”

Chuck laughed and handed the candy bars back to Fester. “I’m fine. You hang onto those for the time being, okay? We’d better find out how Evan is doing.”

“He’s out,” Jodie said. “He hit his head when he fell. The gunshot wound isn’t too bad.” As she said it, she remembered Chuck jumping in front of her, saving her life. He’d been shot in the process in almost the exact same spot as her father had been wounded. And Chuck had died from his wound. “Well, not as bad as it could be,” she added.

“I’ll get a first aid kit and one of those gurneys,” Chuck said. “See if you can find another gun, Fester. You never know if we got them all. We should make a quick sweep of the area.”

“Sure, Chuck,” Fester said, bounding off. “I’ll take care of that.”

Jodie wondered where Nick and everyone else had gone. And, what was her father doing here? She’d have a lot of questions for him when he woke up. She pressed down on her father’s chest, suddenly feeling a slight vibration of the ramp she sat on. Something made a deep rumbling sound in the distance and the building began to shake. She turned, seeing Chuck running toward her from inside the ship. “What’s wrong?”

Chuck bent down, taking out gauze to cover Evan’s wound. He handed it to Jodie and pulled out the tape, tearing off a long strip. “They’re gone. The cryotubes . . . Hana.”

“What?” Jodie said, feeling the blood drain from her face. “What do you mean, gone?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “I went back to the room we were in and it’s empty. That sound we heard . . . could it have been another ship?”

Jodie focused on her father, taping down the gauze. “I don’t know. It had to have been, but Hanna didn’t say anything about another ship.” Jodie felt underneath her father, her hand coming away smeared with blood. “We need to turn him over. The bullet went all the way through,” she said.

Chuck put his hands under her father and gently turned him on his side. He helped her dress the wound in silence. Jodie looked up, seeing Fester positioned behind a shelf, an automatic weapon in his hands pointed at the door he’d come in. “Fester, where is everyone else?” Jodie could see his face reddening as he turned in her direction.

“They’re . . . uh, they’re safe. Your dad knows where they’re waiting.”

Jodie knew there was more to the story. Obviously, Nick and Christy wouldn’t have sent Fester back into the installation willingly. She’d wait for a full explanation until later. Right now, she had more important things to attend to. “Chuck, how are we getting out of here? Any ideas?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Chuck said. “I did notice we were in a loading area while I was being shot at. I’ll go see if I can find us a truck.” He trotted off to the other side of the room.