Nightmare (34 page)

During the witching hour, things got hairy.

It started when Jordin began taunting the ghosts of Alcatraz,
despite my warnings.

"Why don't you come out and get us!" she shouted as we
patrolled the hallway outside Cell Block B. "Come on! We're just
a couple of little girls! You're not scared of us, are you?"

"Stop it!" I yelled. "I've told you not to tease or insult whoever
or whatever resides in haunted places."

Jordin turned to me with a pained, annoyed face. "Maia, get
real. We're talking about the very worst elements of society. These
were criminals, not tragic victims. Do you seriously think that
the prisoners who lived here deserve our respect?"

A tremendous shaking sound came from somewhere up in the building's rafters. We shined our flashlights up there, along
with all of our recording equipment. It was like a group of people
were standing up there and rattling and pounding on the I-beams
with their bare hands, though we saw nothing.

I spoke in a soft voice, my eyes still scanning the ceiling. "A
lot more people lived and died here than just prisoners. This
penitentiary is just one chapter of Alcatraz's long history."

"It's a big island," remarked Jordin. "Did they all die right
here in this one building?"

I was about to reply when the silence was broken again, only
this time by the stifled roaring of an angry mob. It was as if a
hotly contested baseball game were going on in another part
of the building. I knew we should be chasing after its source,
but we just stood there, stunned, listening to the shouting and
grunting and fighting.

Jordin snapped out of it first when the crowd fell silent. "Oh,
so all the big bad prisoners are in the house tonight," she called
out. "Where ya been, fellas? It's about time we got this party
started!"

In response, a cacophony of sounds erupted up near the ceiling. Banging rafters, fierce, howling winds, shouting voices. The
place had suddenly come alive, and we could more than hear it. We
could feel it. It was the loudest example of paranormal activity I'd
ever heard, like the prison was suddenly full of living prisoners
again, and although I was furious with Jordin for instigating it,
I was gratified that we at least got the whole thing on tape.

The thunderous sounds went on for a good two minutes
before the building finally fell silent again. I had my hand reared
back to smack Jordin when she let out a shout. Both of her hands
flew up to the top of her head.

I turned my flashlight on her and saw three narrow streaks
of blood slowly emerging from her hairline and creeping down
her forehead.

"Move your hands, let me see," I said, shooing her hands
out of the way.

She leaned over so I could part her hair and see the scratches.
They weren't terribly deep, but they were red and angry and oozing a small amount of blood.

My face was as hard as stone when she looked back up at
me. Hers was unreadable, though she still winced from the pain
on her head.

"You think maybe you're done playing around now?" I asked,
not caring about the harsh, unsympathetic tone in my voice.

She wasn't happy, but conceded a nod.

We spent the rest of the night outside.

"You ready for this?" I asked Derek as he zipped up his blue
jumpsuit.

"It'll be a miracle if it works," he replied, adjusting the ID
badge hanging from his lapel so that the photo on it was partially obscured. A blue cap pulled down near his eyes completed
the effect.

I lay on the gurney on my back. "It's all we've got," I told
him.

I pulled the white sheet up over my body and waited patiently
while they exited the front seat of the ambulance. I took deep
breaths to calm my pounding heart.

The back door of the ambulance was flung open and Derek
and Pierre, behaving like they knew exactly what they were doing, grabbed the back end of the gurney and pulled it out until the
wheels popped down to the ground. Then they pushed me up
the ramp leading to the back of the loading dock.

I was afraid that procuring the ambulance and disguises
would prove difficult, but Pierre had taken the reins for that
task. After hiking about half a mile back down the mountain,
Pierre found a large rock, about a foot in diameter, and held it
over his shoulder, waiting. About five minutes later, the next
ambulance came driving through, and Pierre ran out to the edge
of the road and lobbed the huge rock toward the vehicle. It was
too heavy to get very far, and never actually made contact with
the ambulance, but the driver saw it and must've thought it was
part of a rockslide, because he swerved madly to get out of the
way and ran off the road.

While the driver and his partner were still stunned, Pierre
opened the driver's door and pulled something out of his pocket.
The next thing we knew, he was pulling the driver from the vehicle,
unconscious. I glanced in the truck and saw that the other worker
was similarly knocked out.

Derek and I looked at him in disbelief. Pierre held up his
tiny device-a miniature Taser-and explained, "I cover some
interesting parts of Boston."

Ten minutes later, we were pulling up to the loading dock
of the massive DHI building.

I played my part, keeping my eyes closed and remaining completely limp as the DHI worker at the top of the ramp shoved my
head to one side to inspect the symbol on the back of my neck.
He must've been satisfied with what he saw, because he let me
go and we were rolling again.

I heard a hydraulic door slide open and the rush of warm air
as we entered the building.

"We're alone," Derek whispered.

I opened my eyes and looked around. The place was white
and sterile, though a closer inspection of the walls indicated
that they were made of the same concrete as what we saw on the
building's exterior, with more of the endless overlapping symbols
carved into every part of their surface.

Otherwise, it was a very high-tech facility, with lots of sliding
doors, armed security, and the occasional computer terminal
that looked like it came out of a spaceship.

Derek and Pierre followed another gurney and two jumpsuited workers about twenty feet ahead of us, assuming we were
supposed to be headed to the same place they were. They entered
a large elevator up ahead, but the doors closed before we could
reach them.

When the car returned, the guys wheeled me inside and I sat
up when the doors closed. There were about fifteen floors, but
the one at the top was labeled New Arrivals, so with a glance at
Derek and me, Pierre pushed the button.

I lay back down as we ascended.

"What exactly is the plan here?" Pierre asked.

"The plan is to get my fiance back," Derek replied.

"Assuming that's possible," I added, before realizing how
insensitive I sounded.

I closed my eyes as the doors parted but peeked out through
slitted lids. I saw we were in a large, curved hallway. I imagined
that we must've been on the outer edge of the building, tracing
its circumference. A large set of stainless steel doors waited ahead
on the left, and they parted as we approached.

I heard Derek gasp and chanced raising my head just enough
to get a quick glimpse.

I couldn't stifle the similar gasp that escaped my lips,
either.

The brightly lit, spotlessly clean room was a perfect circle, yet
it was enormous, easily the size of the building's entire diameter,
minus the outer hallway we'd just been in. The chamber was filled
with hundreds of tiny cubicles that rose about five feet high,
dotting the interior with only a handful of narrow corridors in
between to allow access.

The walls surrounding the room were like nothing I'd ever
seen. I only got a quick look, but they seemed to be on fire.

A technician in a lab coat stood just inside the door but was
facing the room's interior. I saw him starting to swivel in our
direction and quickly snapped my eyes shut.

"Name?" the man asked.

There was a moment's hesitation as Derek and Pierre must've
been deciding what to do. Derek was the one that spoke. "Maia
Peters."

Guess he figured honesty was the best way to go.

"Let's see," said the technician, consulting a hand-held computer tablet. "Peters, yes. She goes to booth 1219. Hook up her
IV and make sure she gets her sedative. They'll send for her when
it's time for her procedure."

Neither Derek nor Pierre offered a reply, but we started rolling
again, and I could only assume that the cubicles were numbered
somehow, because we found our way to an empty one after a few
minutes.

I opened my eyes when we were in and saw that the gray, drab
cube was made of standard, movable wall dividers, and it was barely big enough to hold my gurney and the two men. I sat up,
careful not to let my head rise above the low partition walls.

"These cubicles. . ." I whispered. "Are they all-?"

"Filled with unconscious people?" Derek finished. "Yeah.
Saw a ton of them when we wheeled you in."

"This is where they do it," I said. "It has to be."

"You think this `procedure' kills its victims?" asked Pierre,
oblivious to or uncaring about Derek's fears.

But I had a different thought. "If the victims die, then why
would they need all these booths?"

Derek liked this line of reasoning, and nodded enthusiastically. "Maybe they have to keep their bodies alive for the whole
thing to work. It could be how they keep the souls bound to the
earth. Since they're never actually dead, they can't move on to
heaven or hell."

It made sense. But it was also a bit too easy. I suspected there
had to be more to it.

"Did you see the walls?" mentioned Pierre. "It looked like
double-paned glass or Plexiglas or something, with fire burning
between the panes."

"There was a symbol etched into the glass," Derek said, turning to look at me. "A familiar symbol."

"Which one?" I asked.

"The one that means binding."

"I saw something else," Pierre said. "It was on the far side of the
room. It looked like some kind of grid, but it was enormous."

Derek nodded. "I saw it, too. It was the only part of the room
that wasn't uniform. It stands out, so it's got to be important.
Probably where they do this `procedure.' But the place is so big,
it was hard to get a good look at it from this distance."

Pierre frowned. "I only saw a few of those lab techs or whatever they are, but maybe we could wring some info out of one
of them."

Derek looked at him sidelong. "I don't think holding one of
these people at Taser-point is going to be enough to get them
talking."

"Then we'll use something else," I said.

Ten minutes later, a scientist with a name tag that identified
him as Dr. Michael Simms was standing inside booth 1219 with
us. Pierre stood behind him, holding what looked like the barrel of a gun inside one of the pockets of his jumpsuit. In reality,
it was a metal handle we'd pried off of the gurney, the end of it
jammed into Simms's back. But he believed it was a gun and
that was all that mattered.

He was a tall man, middle-aged, with impossibly heavy eyelids. There was no emotion in his eyes, no passion, no life. His
mouth was carved into a perfectly straight line, and you could
easily imagine that he'd never smiled, even once.

Simms wore the standard white lab coat that all of the scientists in the building wore. His shoes were shined, his hair slicked
back, and he carried a hand-held computer tablet, which I quickly
snatched away from him.

"I have no idea how you found this place or got inside, but
you'll never leave here alive," Simms said.

"What are you people doing in here?" I asked, skimming
through the information stored in the tablet. "Are you sucking
people's souls out of their bodies?"

"No, no," Simms replied. "You make it sound so crude. Our scientists are doing groundbreaking work that's beyond anything
the world has ever seen, breaching the barrier between the physical and the metaphysical."