the Devil's Workshop (1999) (12 page)

"Son of a gun, an' I thought it was 'cause he was so important,"

she said, shaking her head in wonder. "Well, lemme get this order in 'fore y'all faint from hunger." She moved away, and as she passed the table full of soldiers, they whistled at her, pawing out as she swept past.

"Need another round of beer, Stace," one of them shouted.

"It's comin', sugar," she chirped, and darted past them. "And hold it down. This ain't the rodeo." She gathered some dirty plates off a sideboard and backed through the swinging doors into an over-hot kitchen where Barney, the harassed owner-chef, was flipping burgers, stirring chili, and falling behind on the orders. He patted his damp forehead with the towel he always had around his neck.

"One Bud Light and another round of long-necks for the table from hell," she said to Barney. "Dr. Lack wants a CB, full-house, and a side bowl of red. And the two 'bos are almost through with the raccoon cleanup, so you better decide what ya want to pay 'em and throw their steak an' eggs on."

"I'm goin' inta the trees here, Stace," Barney said. "I'll get to the hobos when I can."

He put the beers on her tray with an opener, then shoved two fruit salads through the pass-through. "Here's yer two number fours with yogurt sides for table nine."

"Right," she said, scooping them both up, balancing them on one hand. Then she picked up the tray of beers and backed through the swinging doors, into the restaurant. She set the salads on a side bar and took the long-necks over to the rowdies.

"Here's the rescue lady," one of the soldiers yelled as she snapped the tops off with a church key and passed the beer around. The one closest to her tried to slip a hand around her waist as she leaned in to distribute the last beer to the soldier by the window.

"Easy there, babe," Stacy said, playfully slapping his hand away. "Don't be messin' with the wagonmaster."

The others hooted their appreciation.

After her parents died, she had waitressed all during her teens to save up enough to put herself through college. The first thing she had learned was how to serve a meal without getting tackled.

She finished distributing the beer and scooped the salads up off the back console and moved with them to a nearby table occupied by a mid-sixties couple named Sid and Mary Saunders.

Sid was a retired dentist, with a full supply of old jokes. Mary was gray-haired and always pleasant. They told her they had just had their silver wedding anniversary and had moved to Vanishing Lake to live out their golden years. Mary was glaring at the table full of rowdy soldiers.

"How do you ever put up with it?" she asked angrily.

"Sorry, Mrs. Saunders. I just got through asking them to hold it down. Here's yer two low-cal pineapple boat salads, each with a side a' peach yogurt," she said, sliding the plates in front of them. "I'll get yer two iced teas."

Mary went on, "When it was a prison we were so worried somebody would escape and kill us in our beds. We thought it would be so much better when the University took it over, but now we have all these soldiers."

"Oh, why don't you quit yer damn complaining," Sid growled uncharacteristically, startling both Mary and Stacy.

"All morning you've been sullen and mean," Mary said. "What on earth is the matter with you, Sid?"

"I'll be right back," Stacy said, wanting to avoid this strange domestic quarrel. As she turned away to get their iced tea, she heard Mary say, "Don't glare at me like that!" Then Stacy heard a commotion behind her at the Saunders table. She turned and saw Sid scramble unexpectedly to his feet. He was glaring angrily at his wife.

"What is it?" Mary demanded.

"God damn you!" he shouted.

"I beg your pardon?" Mary Saunders said.

Now everybody in the restaurant fell quiet and looked at the round-faced dentist, who was cursing at his wife in public for no apparent reason. His face was suddenly contorted, his complexion pumped with blood.

"You hush up, Sidney," Mary hissed. "Sit back down and behave. What's gotten into you?"

"Fuck you!" he screamed in rage. Then he reached down and picked up a serrated steak knife from a basket on the console. Without saying another word, he lunged at his wife and plunged the knife deep into her chest. Mary Saunders let out a gasp as the knife was slammed into her up to the handle. Blood, thick as motor oil, oozed down her white silk blouse and pooled in her lap. Then she began to scream as her husband turned and bolted from the coffee shop amid the startled shouts of the other patrons.

Stacy had momentarily frozen, but now reached out for the old woman, who was still seated upright in the booth, looking down at the knife in her chest in horror and disbelief. Then Mary went into her first death spasm. Her whole body jerked uncontrollably, her right hand banged hard against the table. The blade had pierced her heart, and Stacy knew that the convulsions signaled oxygen starvation in the cerebral cortex. The old woman spasmed several more times as Stacy held her, trying to give her comfort. Then Mary Saunders let out a long sigh and fell sideways onto the upholstered couch.

Stacy reached out and felt for a heartbeat, but Mrs. Saunders was dead.

Sid was standing in the middle of the street between the restaurant and the dock. His teeth were bared. He was still yelling obscenities. Two soldiers had chased him out of the restaurant. They stood on the porch of the Bucket a' Bait, looking with alarm at the growling, snarling dentist in the center of the street.

"Let's go. Let's take him. He's just an old guy," the tall Army Corporal said. "You go right, I'll go left."

They separated and moved off the porch, toward Dr. Saunders. It was then that the old man charged. He attacked with such fury that both twenty-year-olds could not restrain him. He clawed at them. His teeth snapped savagely as they tried to tackle him.

Two other soldiers from their table could see through the window what was happening outside. They got up and followed their buddies onto the porch. They watched in disbelief as the old dentist seemed to actually be overpowering two men one-third his age. The rage and adrenaline that drove him were, in that moment, too much for them. The two remaining soldiers bolted into the street. It took all four of them to finally subdue Sid Saunders.

They tied his hands behind his back, using their belts. Then they dragged him, screaming and cursing, into the restaurant. Barney suggested they put him in the empty food locker out back. It was a sturdy, windowless room with a padlock. They shut the door and snapped the latch. They could still hear him shouting incoherently after the door was closed.

"What the fuck was that all about?" Barney said, his voice a whisper of shock and dismay.

Nobody answered.

Stacy Richardson had a theory. Only Charles Lack knew exactly what had just happened.

"We got an event over here," Dr. Lack said to Dexter DeMille over the telephone from inside the restaurant. "I think... I think..."

"You think what?" Dr. DeMille snapped impatiently. He was in his lab in Building Six at Vanishing Lake Prison.

"We've got a problem. A guy at the restaurant just went nuts and killed his wife." Dr. Lack lowered his voice. "He behaved exactly like the test case yesterday."

"That's impossible," Dexter DeMille shouted. "How could that be?"

"Obviously, some of your damn mosquitoes got loose," Dr.

Lack hissed. "I told you that it was a mistake. We should never have used an aerobiological vector."

"Let's not go into that now," Dexter said. "Stay there, I'm on my way," and he hung up.

The bio-hazard team from the prison roared into town fifteen minutes later. Dr. DeMille was the first one out of the windowless van. He moved into the restaurant with his medical bag, followed by three M
. P. S
. Barney unlocked and cautiously opened the door to the food locker. Stacy Richardson moved to where she could see into the room over their shoulders.

Dr. Sidney Saunders was now kneeling on the floor leaning against the sidewall. His hands were still tied behind him. The rage was no longer in his eyes. Instead, there was a look of desperate confusion. He tried to stand as they entered, but staggered, and like Troy Lee, fell over, going down on his right side. He had lost his equilibrium; drool was streaming down his chin.

"Look for a labrum injection mark," Dr. DeMille said to Dr. Lack, referring to a mosquito bite, knowing the scientific language would elude the civilian restaurant patrons. "See if you can isolate it. We can do a tracking scan later," DeMille finished.

They were working feverishly, pulling Sid Saunders's shirt off, checking around his hairline.

"Here," Dr. Lack said, and pointed to a mosquito bite on the back of the dying man's neck.

"Get him in the van," DeMille said. "Forget bio-containment. We've gotta move fast."

"What's going on here?" Barney said again. "Does this have something to do with yer experiments over at the prison?" But Drs. Lack and DeMille were already following the uniformed M
. P. S
, who had picked up the dying sixty-year-old dentist and were carrying him out of the restaurant. They put him in the back of the truck. The M
. P. S
pushed Barney away from the van and slammed the back door before scrambling in and roaring away.

Mary Saunders still lay dead in the booth at table two. Only after the van left did Barney make calls to the County Coroner and Sheriff, which were fifty miles away in Bracketville, a town with only a two-man substation. The Sheriff said they would get up there as soon as possible, and suggested that Barney take Mary over to the big walk-in fish cooler on the dock and put her there until the County people showed up.

Stacy Richardson slipped out of the restaurant in the confusion and moved up the hill to a little two-room wood cottage in the back that Barney sometimes rented to employees. She noticed absent-mindedly that the two hobos had finished their cleanup, but had left without waiting to get paid or fed. She assumed that, like homeless people everywhere, they were sensitive to their vulnerability and had fled during all the frenzied activity.

Stacy took out a key, opened the door, and moved into her cluttered cottage. She went directly to her small desk and pulled a binder down off the shelf, which read:

She opened it to a section she had labeled:

Then she turned the binder to a fresh page and wrote:

"Dr. Sidney Saunders, DDS."

"Near death at 10:30--07/16/99. Condition appears to be neuro
-
related."

Below that she wrote: "The death resembles no condition before observed. Probable iatrogenic infection, homicidal rage, followed by status epilepticus. Mosquito vector." Then she wrote a detailed medical account of Sid Saunders's bizarre homicidal pre-death behavior.

Also pasted in the binder were several long-lens photos of
Charles Lack and Dexter DeMille, along with both men's scientific histories. Under Dr. DeMille's bio, Stacy wrote the new information Dr. Lack had provided: "DeMille is unstable, dissociative, and suicidal." Yet it was stable, fun-loving, nonsuicidal Max who had supposedly stuck a twelve-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Chapter
10

They were seated in the old parole board hearing room in the big, rectangular pale brick administration building. Out the windows across the yard they could see the high tower that contained the gas chamber in center block.

Admiral James G. Zoll was seated with his back to the windows that streamed sunlight past him and lit the unhappy faces of Dexter DeMille, Charles Lack, and Colonel Laurence Chittick. Seated at the end of the room, with his back to a large map of Vanishing Lake, was Captain Nicholas Zingo. He and his "Torn Victor" Delta Force Rangers were assigned to Admiral Zoll for program security and had arrived with the Admiral and Colonel Chittick half an hour ago from Fort Detrick, in three unmarked Blackhawk helicopters.

Captain Zingo was a muscular thirty-year-old, who Dexter DeMille feared would be ordered one day to kill him. Torn Victor was a unit combat designation and included ten event-trained Delta Force Rangers, who immediately upon arriving had commandeered the available jeeps and two half-tracks at the prison, then quickly deployed them around Vanishing Lake. Captain Zingo had an earpiece attached to a belt radio and was monitoring his deploying Rangers through his headset, while at the same time listening to what was going on in the briefing room.

"I assume it's your cocktail that caused this?" Admiral Zoll asked Dr. DeMille, his sandpapery voice filling the room and raising the hair on the back of Dexter's neck.

"Before we know that for sure," Dexter said, "we'll need to do a brain slice and examine the tissue under an electron microscope at forty-seven thousand power to see if unusual amounts of amyloid plaque are present in the cells and if--"

"Cut the shit, Doctor," Admiral Zoll interrupted. "I don't need a buncha nano-chat. Is it our stuff that caused this or not?"

Dexter couldn't bring himself to answer. He looked around the room and his eyes accidentally caught Dr. Lack's.

"It's us, Admiral," Charles Lack said, as if invited in by Dexter's helpless look.