Trauma (42 page)

Carrie waited until the van got some distance before she started her car's engine. She was short of breath, but not determination. The van took a left out of the lot and Carrie followed. She glanced at the two-way radio on the seat beside her. No way to reach David now. He was probably in handcuffs by this point.

Sick as she was about David, she could call somebody for help. From her purse, Carrie retrieved her phone without losing sight of the van. At that moment, the van made a sudden left turn and Carrie pulled to a quick stop on the side of the road, confused.

The turn made no sense to her. The van had gone down the access road to the VA's long-abandoned construction project on the hospital annex. The access road was a dead end, not a through street. Nothing was down that way but the boarded-up brick building.

A few seconds of contemplation, nothing more. She had to follow.

Carrie shut off her car's headlights and took the same turn as the van. It was dark, and hard to see, but Carrie managed not to drive off the potholed road and into a ditch. The four-story building loomed large in front of her. Battered chain-link fencing surrounded the annex, a symbolic “keep out” gesture at best. The structure was built on what appeared to be a weed-strewn sandlot dotted with rusted trash barrels. At the rear of the annex, beyond the fencing, was a dense patch of scraggly-looking trees and a sea of unruly brush.

When Carrie reached the halfway point, she let up on the gas and pulled over to the side of the road. She could see the van in front of her, and that meant the people inside would be able to see her.

The van drove up to the fence and Taggart got out. He pried the fence open where there was not any gate, and secured the pliable metal flap using two bungee cords, creating a makeshift entrance wide enough for the van to drive through. They must have cut the fence so from a distance the perimeter would not appear to have been breached.

Hernandez brought the van close to the building, but kept the engine running. Taggart stayed with McGhee, while Hernandez put the van in reverse and drove back through the fence opening. Carrie panicked, thinking he would drive right past her car, but instead he drove off the road and down what appeared to be a path that cut through the growth behind the annex.

Just like that, the van was gone.

A moment later, Hernandez emerged from a thicket of trees and brush. He went back through the fence and undid the bungee cords holding the flap in place. He caught up to Taggart, who waited for him at what must have been a rear entrance into the abandoned building. Sure enough, Taggart opened a door, and soon all three men vanished inside.

Carrie rolled down her window to battle back a sudden wave of nausea. Only then did she realize she was completely soaked in sweat. She watched the building for a few minutes and felt certain nobody was coming out. Why would Hernandez have hidden the van if he planned to go somewhere anytime soon?
The plan,
Carrie thought.
Get the evidence
. Maybe there was a window, some way for her to take a picture without entering the building.

A voice inside her head spoke up. She was unarmed, outnumbered, and untrained, while Hernandez was solid muscle and a skilled combat vet. No contest.

“Be smart here, Carrie,” she said aloud.

Then she remembered the call she'd been about to make. Carrie retrieved her smartphone and dialed a number stored in her contacts. The phone rang four times before somebody finally answered.

Dr. Finley sounded logy. “Yeah, hello?”

“Alistair, it's Carrie. There's an emergency. I need your help.” Her speech came out hurried and short of breath.

“Carrie, what on earth? What's going on?”

“The VA Police have my friend David Hoffman in custody right now. You have to tell them he's not a threat. He's with me.”

“In custody? Why? And what do you mean he's with you? What are you doing?”

“I don't have time to explain, but there's something terrible happening at the VA. Sandra Goodwin and Cal Trent are kidnapping the DBS patients.”

“What?” Dr. Finley sounded fully awake now, and appropriately alarmed.

“They've been experimenting on people, Alistair,” Carrie said. “It's not DBS that's curing them. It's some sort of drug they've been given, I'm sure of it—something from CerebroMed, but it doesn't always work. There are side effects like palinacousis, maybe others. And Ram
ó
n Hernandez, he's involved, same as the nurse from the VA, Lee Taggart. I just watched them take Garrett McGee off of the neuro recovery unit.”

“Carrie, you realize you sound absolutely mad.”

“It's happening, whether you want to believe me or not. Now, please—help my friend David and call the police.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at the VA hospital annex construction site. That's where they brought McGhee.”

“Okay, okay. Just get out of there. Get out now. I'll call the police and I'll call you right back.”

Carrie ended the call. She knew the smart thing to do: get out. Of course she should do just that.

But a thought came to her.
What if the van takes off with McGhee inside before the police arrive?
More proof gone. She should at least get the license plate. It might be a vital bit of evidence the police would need.

Carrie scolded herself for not taking video of the two men lifting McGhee into the back of the van. So much had happened so fast she had not been thinking clearly. She could at least get a picture of the license plate, and then get out of there. For Abington, for Fasciani, for all the vets who had been hurt because of Goodwin and Trent—she owed it to them.

Carrie fired up the engine, but kept the lights off as she drove ahead. If anybody saw her coming, she could slam the car into reverse and make a quick escape. A hundred feet from the chain-link fence, Carrie pulled to the side of the road. She kept the engine running as she got out.

Her feet crunched on the hard-packed dirt, and the glow of city lights in the distance shone like an artificial dawn. Blood pounded in her ears, but she could still hear the drone of millions of buzzing insects that infested the woods where the van had been hidden.

Carrie's nerves were crackling. To her left she saw the path down which Hernandez had driven the van. She vanished inside the forest that bordered the access road and reached the van in a matter of feet. Her hands shook violently, but she managed to get a few pictures of the Massachusetts license plate.

The van itself was completely unremarkable, scuffed up some, dented in places. She did not linger and was soon headed down the path, back to her idling car. The whole trip took a few minutes at most. Carrie settled into the driver's seat and let the feeling of relief wash over her.

As soon as her hands found the steering wheel, Carrie felt a presence rise behind her. Her eyes went to the rearview mirror and she took it all in: the short-cropped hair, strong jawline, broad shoulders. Almost immediately Carrie recognized the silhouette of Terry Bushman, the second vet she had examined.

“Never turn your back on a marine,” Bushman said. “We're sneaky bastards.”

Carrie screamed and tried to get out, but Bushman reached his powerful arm over the seat and brought it down alongside Carrie's neck. Bushman's left hand pushed against his right wrist. He made a muscle with his right arm that bulged into the side of Carrie's neck. The pressure was directly on her two carotid arteries, thankfully not her larynx or throat.

One second
.

Carrie struggled to break free.

Two seconds
.

She tried to scream.

Three seconds.

Her world was gone.

 

CHAPTER 57

The first thing Carrie noticed was the smell. It was damp and mildewed, like the fetid water of a marsh. There was a whiff of urine, too, as well as a rank body-odor smell that made her want to gag. She felt tender soreness on both sides of her neck, but nothing on her throat. A sick, flulike feeling made it hard to focus. She wondered if she'd been drugged. Probably. What had happened?

As her awareness became more acute, Carrie heard moaning and what sounded like people mumbling. The noises came from both her left and right, and it was different men who spoke. They made strange groaning and grunting sounds. Disturbed. Panicked. She could make out some of the words.

“Get down! Get down!”

The voice that spoke was sharp-edged, but muted, and the words were slurred like somebody talking in their sleep.

A different voice said, “We're taking fire from the north side. Where they at? Where they at?”

More voices blended together. The chatter was best described as incessant, like the buzzing of the insects that occupied the woods behind the annex—only these were human voices, maybe half a dozen in total, mumbling simultaneously.

“I'm hit! I'm hit!”

“Talk, talk, talk to me.”

“Oscar Mike! Oscar Mike!”

“Go! Go!”

“Clear!”

“The rounds are firing downwind.”

On and on it went, without letup, until the chorus of voices became a single droning noise that Carrie could ignore. Her eyes fluttered open and she focused on what appeared to be the stripes of a mattress. It smelled, too—truly foul, just like the rest of this space.

With great effort Carrie managed to push onto her hands and knees. She lifted her head groggily and blinked rapidly. Her vision must not have cleared entirely, because what she saw made no sense to her. It looked like she was inside a dog kennel of some kind. Galvanized tubular frames held in place heavy-duty-gauge chain-link wire. The wire covered all sides of the welded structure, including the top. The single door, framed with galvanized tubes and covered in wire, was secured with a heavy chain and a heavy-duty padlock.

Carrie looked right and saw three additional kennels all in a row. Inside each wired enclosure was a thin and dirty man. Each of the three men sported a different stage of facial hair growth, as if it marked the length of his stay here. One had stubble, one had a full beard, and one looked like the Taliban. The man in the cage closest to Carrie rested on a grimy mattress, while the other two paced about their enclosures like animals at the zoo. Each man had sunken, hollow eyes, and a vacant stare. Those who moved about ambled with a zombie's gait. They wore blue hospital scrubs that were soiled and tattered and in such deplorable condition it made them look like shipwreck survivors. Affixed to each man's arm was an IV drip, secured in place with tape and hooked to a rolling metal IV stand. All three men muttered to themselves and seemed completely oblivious to Carrie's presence.

Inside each kennel was a blue bucket, into which Carrie watched one man urinate. Water bottles were strewn about, and trays with food scraps attracted a large congregation of buzzing flies. The cement floor, the color of rust, was damp with puddles and chipped in spots. Carrie noticed several coiled-up hoses outside the cages—showers, she thought—and drains spaced throughout to capture any excess water.

Lining a concrete wall to Carrie's left was a bank of decrepit-looking washing machines and dryers, some fallen over, some with broken glass and dimpled sides, all industrial strength. She knew then that this was the abandoned laundry facility of the old annex building. A tall pile of industrial laundry machines, like a mini-mountain of junkyard scrap, occupied a sizable area in the center of the cavernous space. Carrie believed she was in a subterranean room, with thick concrete columns peppered throughout to distribute and support the building's substantial weight. Overhead banks of fluorescent lights lit the old laundry facility from above, and flickered on and off as if they were sending Morse code.

“Hey, why are you standing? Get the hell down, or get shot!”

Carrie spun her head in the direction of the voice. Three more kennels stood to her left, but only two had people inside them. The far cage appeared to hold the man Carrie believed to be Garrett McGhee. The person in the cage closest to her, who had ordered her down, caused Carrie's jaw to come unhinged. It was Eric Fasciani! He was skeletal-looking, fierce with his gaze, haunted in every way imaginable.

Like the others, Fasciani wore soiled scrubs. His thin arms were covered in scabbed-over scratches, and Carrie noticed gruesome scratches on his neck as well. His face was bearded like the other men. Nobody shaved them. Nobody took care of them. Lab rats were treated better than this, at least for a while.

“Eric, what are you doing here? What is this place?”

Carrie spoke in a hushed whisper, afraid someone might come for her.

“What are you doing … what are you doing … stop saying that … got Taliban crawling all over this place. We gonna have to shoot our way out.”

“Eric, please, talk to me. Tell me what's happening here.”

“He can't hear you, Carrie Bryant, not really. Not in the way you understand it.”

Carrie's breath caught at the sound of the man's voice. Her heart sank and her spirit cracked wide open. For a few frozen moments, Carrie could not move. She swallowed a jet of bile as the fear set in and anger cooked inside. With gritted teeth, Carrie wheeled and set her frightened gaze on the man who spoke.

Dr. Alistair Finley.

 

CHAPTER 58

“What the hell are you doing?” Carrie screamed at Dr. Finley. “Let me go! Let me out of here!”

Dressed in his trademark oxford shirt and khaki pants, Dr. Finley had a pressed, clean appearance that made the other men's condition look even more deplorable. He approached with honest sympathy in his eyes. Almost a look of heartache, as though he knew Carrie's fate and deeply regretted it. He came over to her kennel and locked his fingers around the wire.

Meanwhile, Fasciani continued to bark and mutter and speak unintelligibly, but Carrie no longer concentrated on what he said. Her entire focus remained on Dr. Finley and three men who accompanied him into this dank cellar: Terry Bushman, Ram
ó
n Hernandez, and Lee Taggart, who held in his hand a long rodlike implement with two pointed prongs on the end. A few of the men in cages took notice of the cattle prod in Taggart's hand, and sank to the back of their kennels as though they'd been conditioned to react that way.