Doorway to Your Dreams, page 18
Tran twisted his sword over his head and brought it squarely onto and through the medic’s neck. The soldier standing behind him pressed his bayonet through Franklin’s abdomen, and pulled it up and through his chest.
The strong spray of blood washed over McAllister’s face as the medic’s head landed in his own bag and a rope of intestines oozed out onto his feet.
“See that, Demon?”
Tran’s eyes were bulging from his face as he laughed hysterically and walked over to McAllister. He looked down and swirled the medic’s entrails with his sword then flung them up against McAllister’s leg.
He giggled in delight.
“Demon. This is all because of you.”
*
DeCarlo flinched slightly as Tran ran his sword through Franklin’s neck when he reached for his medical kit. He saw the kid’s eyes open wide and his mouth form an expression as if to say, “What the fuck?”
“You think you can kill my men, McAllister?” Tran yelled as his man’s bayonet traveled from Franklin’s stomach to his sternum. “Without paying a price?”
DeCarlo watched as Franklin fell to his knees then roll headless, to the jungle floor.
“I don’t think you understand what you have done, McAllister. All of the men you have killed.”
DeCarlo closed his eyes.
There was so much blood.
McAllister’s scream made things even more sweet, and he could feel his cock harden even within the constraints of the thick army fatigues he was wearing.
He heard yet another hack as Tran brought his sword down across the medic’s corpse.
It was time to move.
He took aim and began to shoot.
*
Tran kicked Franklin’s head. It gained slight altitude, landed with a thud on its face, then rolled like a soccer ball into a pool of blood and mud. The eyes were still open and seemed to be looking at his own headless corpse a few feet away.
Tran took his bloody sword and wiped it against McAllister’s cheek. “Well, McAllister? I think we’re almost even.”
“Let him drop,” he said to the men who had been holding McAllister upright.
*
McAllister tried to push back the pain and the voice that was gaining strength from within.
The other voice, the one trapped within his mind, wanted to be set free. Spooncake could hear the blocks within his mind begin to fall and crumble. Gramps’ words overshadowed the crumbling blocks, and the lemniscate began to burn against his flesh.
“Never set him free, Tim. Never let him gain control. You’ll be lost.”
He could see Franklin’s body and head in front of him and remembered the vision he’d had when he touched Franklin earlier in the morning.
It was his fault.
Becoming lost.
Letting the other take control may not be bad.
More blocks began to crumble.
“Let go,” the voice said. “You’re not strong enough.”
Spooncake gathered enough will and looked up at Tran. The smile he wore on his face looked gratified then suddenly turned to fear.
“Let me kill him for you.”
The last blocks within his mind began to crumble as the bullets began to fly. Tran’s men began to fall and explode around him.
McAllister cleared the voice from his head and moved as a soldier fell a few inches from his face, a circular hole on his forehead. He watched as blood and small wisps of smoke trailed out of it.
“You fucking slopes!”
McAllister recognized the voice.
DeCarlo.
Andy’s light was gone the second Tran’s sword hit is neck. Hammond’s was a mixture of red and the deathly confusion of pink.
Spooncake sensed the man’s betrayal.
“You can die, mother fucker,” he said as he made eye contact with his gunner.
McAllister felt a heavy thud on the back of his head, and everything went black.
*
DeCarlo finished taking the pictures he’d need of the scene and knelt onto the jungle floor. He placed his hand on Hammond’s neck and checked for a pulse. It was present. He’d live.
McAllister, Traumland’s prize, was another story.
He, too, was unconscious.
Blood was still freely flowing from the bayonet slash that stretched from his left ear down to his throat. A pricket of bone from his shattered left calf protruded out of the muscle from his leg. His right shoulder, having suffered at least two bullets, was dislocated and pointed unnaturally at a forty-five degree angle into the jungle floor.
DeCarlo placed his hand on McAllister’s neck and felt for a pulse.
Finally, through the sticky muck, he felt it. It was faint. Barely perceptible.
But it was there.
He looked at his hand. It was as if he were wearing a red mitten, a mitten of McAllister’s blood.
“Get these men to the airfield. Make sure the docs know they are coming. I want them on the island tomorrow,” he said to Tran.
DeCarlo walked over to Franklin’s headless body, looked down, and admired the smoothness of Tran’s slice. Something shiny glistened inside of the wound next to where Franklin’s fifth vertebra would be and piqued DeCarlo’s curiosity.
He bent down and looked closer.
“What the...”
Franklin’s dog tags.
He pulled his camera out from the backpack and began snapping pictures.
“This is perfect,” he said.
In the melee, the tags had been tossed up and around his neck. The metal tags with Franklin’s name, rank, and serial number embossed in them were resting next to his exposed spinal cord. The chain had fed itself into Franklin’s gaping esophagus.
DeCarlo focused his camera and quickly snapped two shots. He grabbed the gore-covered tags and shoved them in his pocket along with Hammond’s and McAllister’s. He walked over to Tran’s jeep and watched as the rice ball changed into a captain’s uniform that was two sizes too large. He inspected the canvas gurneys and ensured the straps holding them, and both McAllister and Hammond, were secure. He pulled them tighter.
They weren’t going anywhere.
“Thanks for you help,” DeCarlo said to the soldier that he’d let live in order to help Tran load the men. He was the one Tran said he wanted to bring to the island with him. “But that will be all.”
It was a quick shot.
The kid didn’t know it was coming.
Just like the others he’d dispatched tonight, a new hole appeared on the kid’s forehead, a pink and gray ball of mist appeared behind his head then fell to the ground at the same time the body crumbled and collapsed.
DeCarlo adjusted the eagle talon clasp of his bolo tie and smiled.
“Let’s pack up and get out of here,” he said as he smoothed the wrinkles from his shirt and climbed into the transport.
Plum Island, New York
Traumland Facility
August, 1967
*
At four-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was on the downward trek towards the island’s western shore, and Oban DeCarlo sat in his office watching and listening to the hypnotic sounds of the waves as they crashed against the rocky north shore of Plum Island.
His island.
At its widest, Plum Island was only a mile, but from tip-to-tip it stretched to a bit more than three. The building that housed Traumland was situated at the point of his island’s thin peninsula and allowed him a panorama that included the Atlantic, a dense forest of beach plums, and the shorelines of New London, Connecticut and Long Island, New York. It was now the cusp of summer. The days on the island were long, hot, and humid. The blossoms from the beach plums shrouded the entire island in a fragrant, sweet blanket from May to June. Now the trees provided only shade. In the winter, the trees were bare, and frozen, salty air provided the only scent.
Outwardly, his domain was a simple, government-designed building made of interspersed bricks of red and light brown connected by a patchwork of gray mortar. Two stories were above the ground, two below. A faded gray sign with silver letters in front of the main entrance defined the façade of its outward purpose:
United States Department of Agriculture
Plum Island Animal Disease Center
PIADC
Established 1954
The building’s ground level floor was as non-descript as its brick facing. It housed a few fully furnished offices that nobody occupied and purposely smelled of animal piss and 409. Inside, the green concrete block walls were littered with cork bulletin boards covered with posters depicting sick and dying farm animals with government veterinarians adorned in sterile white bio-hazard coveralls standing nearby. The purpose of each poster was advertised with large black letters:
Hoof and Mouth
Deadly to Them and Us
Plum Island Animal Disease Center
Eradicate Bovine Cholera
Plum Island Animal Disease Center
The first floor was designed as a maze. One entrance. One exit. Several dead ends. No matter where anyone walked or what corner was taken, in time, any person who entered the building’s ground floor ended up in the same place: at the far corner of the building. Here, there was a security office manned by a single armed guard who ensured only those with the access approved specifically by the island’s overlord, Oban DeCarlo, could enter the single elevator and continue one floor upwards or two floors down.
*
DeCarlo swiveled on his chair to face the main area of his office and pressed a toggle switch hidden under the top of his desk that activated a small electric motor located in the desk’s bottom right drawer. With a quiet purr, a wooden panel dropped down then slid backwards into a small routed slot carved within the desk’s top. Within seconds, the top of a television monitor began emerging from the hole as if his desk was giving birth. When the monitor was fully in place, he heard the click of the locks securing the monitor and watched a small white dot appear then grow in the middle of the screen. The smell of the burning ozone created as the monitor warmed up soured the air in this office, and burned his nose.
While he waited for the first blurry video images to appear, DeCarlo took a crystal glass, buffed it to a blinding sparkle, poured four fingers of Chivas from a Waterford crystal decanter he kept at the corner of his desk, and relished three sips. Eventually, the monitor showed the activity in Traumland One, his primary lab located fifty feet away from his office on the opposite side of the building. The image in front of him was filled with the coffin-like, copper sensory deprivation tank where a comatose McAllister had been contained the majority of his days since arriving at his island. DeCarlo pushed the control switch that caused the camera hidden in the ceiling of the lab to zoom out and provide a panoramic view of the lab.
Everyone was busy.
As they should be.
DeCarlo pushed the switch again, and it clicked into place at its middle position. McAllister’s copper coffin disappeared, the image flickered then changed to show one of the dorm rooms located in the building’s lower floor. He pressed the control switch in reverse to zoom in on the person lying prone on the small bed. The image of a supine Linda Fisher filled the monitor.
Even though she was unconscious, her beauty was still striking. He knew she was special when he first read her dossier, saw her pictures, and then watched her float across the casino floor. The graceful way she pushed her hair behind her ears reminded him of his mother. Now her long blonde hair fell next to her face and lay flat on her pillow. Her chest rose and fell with each shallow breath.
She was an angel.
His angel.
DeCarlo closed his eyes and took in a long, deep breath. Even from his office, four floors above her, he imagined her smell. An exotic combination of roses and jasmine, the same scent his mother wore. She looked uncomfortable, but the staff had followed his orders when they secured her to her bed. It was for her safety for the time being.
And his pleasure.
Her arms were above her head and tied to the headboard with leather straps. Her legs, spread wide, were tied to the footboard. Her only clothing was a bra and panties. He moved the camera so the image slowly moved from her brown hair, down the length of her body, to her feet. He lingered momentarily then slowly guided the camera back up until only her mouth filled the monitor.
DeCarlo could feel his heart begin to race as he continued to explore his angel. He felt a very faint stirring between his legs, smiled, and dabbed his top lip with the white napkin he kept folded and readily available on his desk.
He didn’t like to sweat.
He emptied the remaining Chivas he’d poured, opened his desk drawer, and pulled out a small, wooden, rectangular box. Yes, McAllister was the lynchpin to Traumland, but she was just as important. Her power was different. Not as refined. Not as expansive. But her ability to interpret future events was just as significant and would be essential for the continued success of Traumland.
As Traumland progressed and the science evolved, McAllister’s enhanced abilities would stale. Just as the Model T changed the world when it came off of the assembly line, so would McAllister. In time McAllister would be replaced with a newer model. McAllister would become a museum piece to be studied, dissected, and used for parts.
The thought of holding McAllister’s brain in his hands sent chills of anticipation down his spine.
But not Fisher.
She was a mass of clay that could be shaped into whatever he needed as his scientists developed new chemical cocktails.
That was the intention.
The plan.
DeCarlo opened the box. There, encased in foam, was the syringe containing the serum that would define her future.
If she survived.
The syringe’s chamber contained a yellow-orange cocktail the scientists on the floor directly above her dorm room had taken years to engineer and refine. It had cost the lives of four others it had been tested on. The test subjects had been disposable. Inexpensive. Their powers were insignificant compared to either of the thoroughbreds he had in his stable. But their deaths had moved Traumland in the right direction.
Forward.
The cocktail he held in his hands would not only augment her ability to interpret future events but also allow her to eventually manipulate them.
DeCarlo closed the box and returned it to his desk. He needed her fully conscious before it was administered.
Fisher wasn’t ready.
He had additional preparatory research to conduct on her first.
He turned off the monitor and headed down to the dorm room where his angel slept.
*
The bed’s metal frame creaked as DeCarlo sat down next to her. Linda’s body shifted on the mattress and against the restraints to accommodate the added weight.
He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand and traced the jagged reminders from his previous visits with his thumb. She was more angelic in person than the image shown on the black and white monitor in his office revealed.
DeCarlo bent down and nuzzled Linda’s neck. He took in the soft, clean scent of soap that permeated her soft skin. They used the soap he’d prescribed. It was the same soap his mother used: rose and jasmine. Earlier in the day, he had watched the nursing staff give her a sponge bath.
He caressed her long, dark hair. Its silky strands fell between his fingers then floated back onto her pillow.
They washed her hair, too.
Slowly, he moved his hand to her chest and unclasped the two hooks connecting the front of her bra. He lifted each piece of fabric and exposed her chest.
He remembered his mother’s breasts at the end of her life. Large. Wrinkled. Uncontained.
Bestial.
Linda’s breasts were small. Firm. Smooth.
Perfect.
DeCarlo moved his hand to her chest and slowly caressed each of her breasts. Despite being unconscious, her nipples stiffened with his touch.
“You know I’m here.”
Slowly, he put her left nipple between the knuckles of his left hand and twisted.
He imagined her discomfort, her pointless attempt to move away from him.
He twisted harder and further.
He imagined her pleas, begging him to stop.
He pulled.
He imagined her body writhing and saw the grimace of pain across her face.
Finally, he released the pressure and watched the nipple, now red, deformed, and swollen, retreat.
Then did the same to her right.
The only sound in the room was a hiss that escaped from DeCarlo’s mouth as he gripped the nipple tighter and twisted harder.
DeCarlo put his right hand down between his legs as he tormented her breast. He hoped for a release, but there was no reaction. Not even the slightest swelling. The pain he was inflicting was not enough.
He needed blood.
DeCarlo reached into the pocket of his lab coat and retrieved the small knife he’d had since college. Its four-inch blade was tucked within a chamber encased in mother-of-pearl that glistened against the fluorescent lighting.
With his thumb, he pressed the small button on the knife’s hilt. The scalpel-sharp blade snapped out. DeCarlo twisted the knife in the light and watched the reflections dance across the floor and climb the room’s concrete block walls. He noticed a small drop of dried blood on the blade from one of his previous visits and wiped it clean against his white lab coat.
“My angel,” he said as he placed the blade on Linda’s soft skin directly beneath her right eye and below the evidence of his previous four visits.
Slowly, he drew the blade downward from her eye, across her cheek, then to the line of her square jaw. A drizzle of blood began to flow. It pooled on her chin, grew, then cascaded onto her pillow.
