Pestilence: A Medical Thriller Read online

  “My name?”

  “Yeah. You asked me my name. What’s your name?”

  “Ian.”

  “If I looked at your driver license, is that the name I’d see?” she said.

  He grinned. “No. It’s not. But it might as well be.”

  “So what happens now?” she asked.

  “You drive me around, and you drive me around some more. Then I let you go.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.” He looked out the window at the commercial area they were in. Some of the office buildings bordered on being qualified as skyscrapers. “You see that building there? The tall one with the blue lighting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stop there.”

  As the car pulled to a stop in front, he got out first and then waited for her by the hood of the car. She paused a moment in front of the open door. This is it, he thought. She was going to make a run for it. He slipped his hand into his suit coat. Her eyes went wide, then she shut the door and came to him.

  He took her arm and led her into the building. The glass building was fifteen stories and had a nice atrium with a security guard. Gardenias and petunias in fanciful vases sat on glass and wood tables. He smiled at the security guard and squeezed Katherine’s arm, prompting her to smile and say hello. Smart girl, he thought.

  He pushed the button on the elevator, and the security guard rose from his table and started over.

  “Oh,” she said, “My uncle’s working late. We’re trying to convince him to come eat with us.”

  “Who’s your uncle?” the guard said.

  “Robert with Gem Mortgage. They’re on the seventh floor.”

  The guard studied them. He rolled his eyes and returned to his desk, to whatever website he’d been looking at. When the elevator opened, they stepped in and didn’t speak until it closed again.

  “How did you know that man worked here?” Ian said.

  “I looked at the directory when we walked past it.”

  “Hmm,” he said, impressed. “You saved that security guard’s life.”

  “Rather than take five seconds and spare his life, you just wanted to kill him? Why would you do that? Don’t you care if he has a family? What if he has kids?”

  “They might be better off growing up without a father.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “No.” He checked the magazine in his firearm before holstering it again. “My father was a raging alcoholic that lived to a ripe old age. Until I was sixteen years old, he would beat me and my mother a few times a week so badly we’d have to go to the emergency room. We couldn’t keep going to the same one because the cops would get involved, so eventually, we were driving two and a half hours to go to a hospital or clinic that hadn’t seen us before.” He glanced at her. “So like I said, they might be better off.”

  She stared at him, holding his gaze. “You’re lying.”

  He chuckled. “My parents live in Iowa and couldn’t be a nicer couple.”

  “Do they know what…”

  “What I do for a living? They think I’m some mid-level bureaucrat.”

  She kept her eyes forward, on the doors, as the numbers on the dial above them slowly increased. She didn’t say anything until the elevator had stopped and the doors opened. When they stepped off, she said, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  “Only if you don’t do as I say.”

  “No, you’re going to kill me anyway.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you don’t have a soul.”

  He stopped and looked at her. Taking up her arm again, he marched her forward.

  The law firm’s name was emblazoned across double doors with frosted glass. The secretary had already gone home for the night, but a few people still remained, grinding away the nighttime hours. He opened the door and pulled Katherine through with him.

  They walked past two people talking near the front desk. Ian tried checking the names on the doors but found there weren’t any, which was symptomatic of somewhere with high turnover. One man was sitting at his desk, drafting a document.

  “Excuse me,” Ian said. “Where’s Mandy Hatcher’s office?”

  “Um, three doors to the left, down the hall.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Who are you guys again?”

  Ian ignored him and walked to the office. He opened the door and pulled out his pistol. The office was empty. He went back to the lawyer he’d spoken to before.

  “She’s not in. Do you know where she is, by chance? I’m her brother-in-law.”

  “Oh, you’re Tommy. Nice to finally meet you.”

  “You too. Mandy talks about me, huh?”

  “She told us about Ice Cybernetics and how you started it with Kickstarter money and all that. Very cool. Hey, I need some advice on something. If Kickstarter offers me money and then I change my mind, and I—”

  “No offense, but do you have any idea where Mandy is? Sorry, it’s just I want to grab something to eat with her and catch up before I have to leave in the morning. She doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “Oh. Well, whenever we have to work late, her and some of the girls go down to Ah Shucks. It’s a bar and grill next door.”

  “Right, I saw it coming in. Thanks for your help.”

  “Hold on,” he said, standing and minimizing the browsers on his desktop. “I’ll come with. I could use a drink.”

  “Sure,” Ian said.

  “No,” Katherine blurted out. “No, I don’t really… I don’t know. I just want to have a quiet dinner with Mandy.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Ian walked her out and back to the elevator. “If you ever speak up again without my permission—”

  “I saved you the hassle of having to kill someone in a public place. So you’re welcome.”

  Ian glanced at her and then stared forward again, until they were off the elevators. They went outside, where he spotted the bar’s white canopy over a green-striped door.

  Ian stepped out front as two women were walking out. He recognized one of them and quickly spun Katherine around and put his arms over her waist, pretending to be whispering to her. He slowly took out his phone and checked Mandy’s photo. The picture was perhaps a few months old, but that was the same woman.

  As the women were walking down the sidewalk, two men ran up from behind. One of them smashed what looked like a small bat into the head of the other woman and then into Mandy’s jaw. They picked up Mandy and dragged her to a van parked at the curb.

  Ian laughed.

  “Wow, today is not her day.”

  Katherine wasn’t even smiling.

  “Looks like someone else had the same idea,” he said.

  Ian casually strode up to the two men. One had opened the back doors to the van, and the other was holding Mandy, who was unconscious. On the inside of the van were shackles and chains.

  Ian grabbed the man’s wrist and jerked it away from his body before spinning it toward him and then snapping it in a direction it wasn’t supposed to go. The man screamed, and Ian thrust the tips of his fingers into the man’s eye, popping it out of the socket. He bashed his fist into the man’s sternum which knocked him back.

  The other one swung at him with the bat. Ian grabbed it with both hands on the downward motion and slammed it back into his face. He kicked down into the man’s shin and then his knee before twisting behind him and smashing his face through the van door’s window. He opened the door all the way, almost gingerly placed the man’s head inside the van, and then slammed the door, again and again and again, until blood had spattered inside the van and his brains were laying there like jelly.

  “Hmm,” Ian said. He pulled out the pistol and fired into the exposed brain. “Never done that before.”

  Mandy was groaning on the warm cement. Ian pointed his pistol.

  “No!” Katherine shouted. “Please don’t!”

>   “As you wish.” He tucked away the pistol, and relief washed over her face. In one violent motion, he knelt and spun Mandy’s head almost all the way around and then twisted it backward, separating the spine from the body at C2, the spine’s weakest point. Katherine was screaming as he ran to her, grabbed her, and pulled her back to the car.

  20

  Samantha watched the twinkling lights of the Midwest below her. In the dark, inside the gray military plane, she couldn’t really see that she was being held aloft by a machine, and she appeared almost to be floating above the surface of the earth.

  Duncan sat next to her and listened to an audiobook on his phone. She watched him for a moment, thinking back to the proposal she had received in medical school, and wondered what her answer would have been if Duncan had been the one making it.

  “I never get over planes,” he said, removing his earbuds. “That, with the power of our minds, we’ve been able to lift off the ground and sit back and fly. It’s an incredible accomplishment of the human mind, and no one appreciates it. They just complain when their flight is ten minutes late.”

  “I think people have always been that way.”

  He took a sports drink out of his gym bag at his feet and took a long drink before offering it to her. She took a few sips, then pulled out some aspirin and took one with a drink before handing the bottle back to him.

  “How ya doing with everything?” he said.

  “Good as can be.”

  “Do you still get panic attacks sometimes?”

  “They’ve been reduced. But I heard a loud crash the other day, just my mom dropping something, and it gave me one. Any time I’m startled. And I can’t go to bed without checking all the doors twenty times.” She glanced out the window again. “I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know how you would react.”

  “Sam, someone tried to kill you. Not to mention everything that happened in South America and Oahu. You’ve been through some serious trauma. I would be surprised if you didn’t go to therapy. I went to a shrink for about five years a little bit ago.”

  “For what?”

  “Depression. It runs in my family. My grandfather and biological mother both committed suicide.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s not something I talk about much. But anyway, I’m terrified of that, and so when I get even a hint of the blues coming on, I go to a shrink. Sometimes, talking is enough, but occasionally, I need meds.”

  She placed her hand over his. “I’m glad you told me.”

  He smiled awkwardly and took a drink of his bottle.

  When her plane landed at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Samantha had been on the plane for three and a half hours, which was actually less time than she would have spent on a commercial flight. She and Duncan stepped onto the tarmac, and a warm gust of wind hit her. The sensation was both pleasing and ominous. The last time she was in this city, she was nearly killed.

  A national guardsman in a jeep saluted Duncan, not knowing he was a civilian scientist working for the army, and threw their bags in the jeep.

  “Sir, I’ll be taking you into the medical station.”

  Sam climbed into the backseat, allowing Duncan the passenger, then the jeep started and peeled out from the tarmac, heading toward the city.

  “Who’s in charge of the medical station?” Duncan asked.

  “Lieutenant General Olsen, sir.”

  Samantha asked, “Clyde Olsen?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She thought back to the time she had met Dr. Clyde Olsen. He had joined the army to pay for medical school and had decided that a career in the military suited his temperament better than one in medicine. “Medicine is guesswork,” he told her once, “but the military requires no guesswork. You do what your superiors tell you, and your underlings do what you tell them.”

  The last time she had seen him was at a conference in London. He had gotten drunk afterward and invited her to his room, but she turned him down. So he’d picked up one of the other doctors at the conference, and they were arrested for having sex in the hotel pool after hours.

  As the driver hopped on the interstate, she sensed something extraordinarily wrong. Not a single car was on the road. She saw no motorcycles or buses—nothing but military vehicles, particularly large trucks with people crammed in back.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The driver glanced at her and then back to the road. “You’ll have to take that up with General Olsen, ma’am.”

  As they got onto the 405, she still didn’t see any cars, but did spot at least five UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters. When they exited the highway, she knew what had happened inside the homes and stores, and it made her stomach churn.

  No people were there. Doors on homes were left open. Stores had lights on, but no one was inside. The city was empty.

  “Duncan—”

  “I know,” he said, reading her thoughts.

  21

  Howie stood up. Pain flowed through him as though someone had hooked up a hose of it to his head and let it drizzle down into his body. One of his teeth was loose, and when he tugged on it softly, it came out. He spit out the warm blood that flowed from the hole in his mouth. He walked out of the cage and around the guardsman heaped on the ground. He knelt down and held his breath, not knowing if a body could smell so quickly. He had never seen a dead body up close before.

  The only one he could even think of was his grandfather, who had passed away a day short of his seventy-third birthday. He’d gone to the wake, but he wouldn’t go near the casket. He stood on the other side of the room, catching only glances of the pale, mannequin-like face that jutted out of the gleaming box.

  His parents kept telling him to go say goodbye, but he knew, even at ten, that there was nothing there to say goodbye to anymore.

  Ten.

  He thought of Jessica. Reaching into the guardsman’s pockets, he searched for anything he could use—keys, money, cards. But the only two useful things he found were a knife and some matches. The other men had taken the rifle.

  He tucked the knife, a good military-issue knife with a serrated edge, into his waistband and put the matches in his pocket. He glanced around. He had thought that fifty other guardsmen would run up once they heard the gunshot, but none came. Why would they only have one person guarding everyone in that cage?

  He walked through the thicket of trees and soon came to a hill. He climbed it, each step more painful than the next, and had to stop to check his ribs. Placing his fingers over each one, he pushed on them to see how much pain it caused. When he got to the third one down on his right side, the pain nearly toppled him. The rib was fractured, or at least bruised—it had to be. But he wasn’t sure what he could do about it, so he kept walking.

  As he came to the summit of the hill, Los Angeles was below him. But it didn’t look like the Los Angeles he’d grown up in. Lights were on, but far fewer than any other night. At least half the city had gone dark. And over the city were the blinking luminosities of military planes and choppers coming and going.

  He tried to orient himself by searching for landmarks, but it was too dark to see much. Glancing behind him, he was surprised to see the Hollywood sign. Dilapidated and small, its reputation gave it gargantuan proportions and a mythical ambience. But, like the city, it was an illusion, and just underneath the glossy exterior lay mold and rust.

  I’m in the Hollywood Hills, he thought. How long was I out?

  It didn’t matter. He had to get back to Malibu. Jessica was alone.

  He turned down the hill. Hearing voices, he stopped and ducked low. He slowly crawled near the trees and peeked out. He saw another cage like the one he’d been in, and another guard sat at a table in front of it. Farther out, maybe two hundred yards, was another cage and another guard. A little farther than that, though hazy in his vision, was yet another one. That’s why each cage had on
ly one guard: they didn’t have enough soldiers to spare more than one.

  He slid back into the bushes and then went up the hill a ways, careful to stay underneath the trees and away from the road. The choppers overhead were loud, and they had spotlights, but they didn’t fly over him. He kept walking, passing mansions on the way down, and realized he was still in gym shorts without shoes, and his feet were cut. In this situation, clothes didn’t matter one bit, but he needed shoes.

  Palm trees adorned the massive driveway of a particularly beautiful home with a white façade and red Spanish tile roof, just up ahead. Howie crouched and was silent for a moment to make sure he didn’t hear any voices. Then he went up to the house.

  The front door was wide open, so he walked inside.

  The home was immaculately decorated with imported rugs, white marble busts, and a fountain in the center of the front room. Under normal circumstances, he would have been impressed and even a little jealous, but now the ostentation seemed utterly meaningless. What a waste, he thought.

  He climbed a winding staircase to the second floor and located the master bedroom. Going to the closet, he found several suits on one side and women’s clothing on the other. The suits were too big for him, but he went through the casual clothes at the end and found some jeans and a silk tight-fitting shirt. He put them on and then checked the shoes. They were close enough, perhaps a size bigger than he needed.

  His feet were bleeding and black. He went to the tub and washed them.

  He slipped on dress socks and then the shoes. As he went back downstairs, he paused on the stairs, wondering if the house’s owners had guns. He ransacked the bedrooms and didn’t find anything. Weaponry wasn’t hidden downstairs, either. He was about to walk to the fridge before leaving, when he heard something behind him.

  He froze, his fingers searching for the knife he’d tucked away. Slowly, he turned around.

  A black Rottweiler with inch-long teeth was growling at him. The dog had an expensive collar, but other than that, it appeared to be a wild jungle beast.

  “Easy,” Howie said. “Easy.”