The first two bodies she encountered, just outside the elevator, appeared to be a man and a woman. Both were dressed entirely in white, the material stained in various shades of yellow and brown and the bodies themselves nothing more than dried out husks, years into decomposition. Mummy-like. The nails and hair long, dried lips folded back in sadistic grins, empty eye sockets watching her. The head of the woman had nearly been severed by a metal clipboard wielded by the man beside her. Her hand was still at his abdomen, where it appeared she stabbed him with a pair of scissors.
Across from them, the body of a woman (Fogel could only tell because she wore a white skirt) had a ruler embedded in her eye, both her hands still grasping the opposite end.
Not trying to get the ruler out but twisting it in deep, Fogel’s mind whispered.
With the other bodies, Fogel found more of the same. As she walked the length of the hallway, the dead were locked in some kind of macabre dance. Dead by their own hand or that of someone nearby. This wasn’t a place of business or research or learning. This place was a tomb. The air reeked of it.
When she reached two doors, the first labeled SUBJECT “D” – OBSERVATION and the second labeled SUBJECT “D” – CONTAINMENT, she found the first to be ajar and the second locked. The code she found in Trudeau’s office didn’t work.
Fogel nudged open the observation door and stepped inside.
The bodies of two men were slumped over a control panel, both long dead. The one on the left looked like he had chewed through his own wrist. The man on the right had a pen sticking out from his eye socket and a stapler in his right hand. Judging by the remains of his skull, he had bashed his own head in.
While this scene was disturbing, it was eclipsed by what Fogel saw on the other side of the large observation window. The body of a woman sat in a chair at the center of what looked like a sterile hotel room. She faced the window with a notepad on her lap. Her mouth was stuffed full of pages from that notepad, the remains of her cheeks bloated like a chipmunk. She still held a balled up sheet of paper in her left hand. Several more were on the floor surrounding her feet. Embroidered in the woman’s white lab coat above her right breast was the name DR. DURGIN, handwritten with a black marker on the opposite side were the words, WILL SHRINK FOR FOOD.
What the fuck happened here?
A clipboard between the two men in the observation room held about a half-inch worth of pages. The topmost simply said, Charter Observation Log. Someone wrote 309 beside that along with the date, 8/12/1993. The remainder of the page was blank.
Shelves filled with video tapes lined the wall on the left of the room along with a monitor (blank) and a VCR. Fogel studied the machine for a moment—powered on, a tape inside—she pressed the rewind button. The whir of tiny motors filled the room as the tape spun back to the beginning.
15
“Stack? Wake up, buddy, it’s me.”
Former detective Terrance Stack, just Terry now, heard the words, but they sounded as if someone whispered them during a hurricane from the opposite end of a storm drain.
“Terry—you gotta wake up. We don’t have much time.”
This time, the words came from much closer, damn near on top of him.
Stack’s eyes fluttered and opened. First he saw nothing more than a white blur, but with each blink, things got a little clearer. Muck, tears, and dried who-knows-what fell away from his heavy lids, and the room slowly came into focus. He tried to reach up and wipe his eyes, but his hands wouldn’t move. Neither would his arms.
Stack’s head was turned to the side, looking down. When his vision cleared, he found himself looking at the top of the card table in his spare bedroom. When he managed to raise his head and look up, he found himself facing Faustino Brier. His former partner sat in the chair opposite him wearing a gray rumpled suit, white dress shirt, and blue striped tie—an outfit Stack had seen him in probably two dozen times.
“Brier?” The word escaped his throat and found its way out past his dry chapped lips, feeling like sandpaper.
Faustino Brier raised a glass of water and brought it to Stack’s lips. “Drink this. You’ve been out for a while.”
Stack drank. He slurped down the water.
Brier took the glass away for a moment. “Not too fast, you want it to stay down.”
Stack nodded.
Brier let him drink more.
When the glass was empty, Brier set it back down on the table. A smile edged the corners of his mouth.
Stack stared at him, at least a minute, then: “You’re dead.”
Brier only smiled. He leaned back in the chair the way he always liked—the front legs off the ground, balancing precariously on only the back. Stack always told him he’d catch a bad chair one day, one that would break apart under him, and he’d look like a fucking fool when he landed on his ass, but Brier sat like that anyway.
“Am I dead?”
Stack couldn’t move his legs. They held tight against the base of his chair. Even moving his head was a chore. He felt no pain, though, and that was good. That was real good.
Brier leaned forward in the chair. “I’m not gonna lie, buddy. It was your heart. A couple too many beers, people running around your house, your crazy trip up the steps…You pushed just a little too hard and blew a gasket. You knew it was coming, though, right? Not much of anything holds up after eighty-two years of constant beating and abuse. Frankly, I’m surprised you got as many miles out of that body as you did. The only thing holding you together was beer, Denny’s takeout, and beef jerky.”
