Lawless Sign Part Sixteen (Fiction)

Chapter 23: One Step Beyond

I should have quit while I was ahead. I didn’t. I have no rational excuse.

One might argue that I had no business in this situation to begin with. The moment that I discovered my appearance in the bank was more a product of happenstance than any grand plan is the moment I should have focused on other matters. But the god and gods were with me. Up to a point. Again, I am not here to assess blame, nor assign it to externalities. What was to be, was up to me: I am the accountable party.

This portion of the event got off to a promising start. The zoom tube placed me in the hospital’s basement, right by the truck dock. I found the staircase to the tube vault in minutes. Claudia had the images on the cameras down here frozen. Even if someone was looking, they wouldn’t see me. The security systems were under our control. I popped in here the moment we knew the last person had left. Not only was there no one in the vault area, there was no one in the basement above me and no one would be using the elevators for the next twenty-five minutes. It could not have gone better.

We had twenty-five minutes until the Voliant Wave event started up. There were still a few things up in the air.

None of us knew what happened once the hospital made the jump into the scab universe. Did the hospital stay put? Did it disappear? One would have to assume that if the hospital was in the routine habit of vanishing, if even for moments, either someone noticed it or there were precautions to prevent that from happening.

The hospital was near the expressway, off a  paved loop through overgrown wetlands. It was surrounded on three sides by choppy ground clotted with dense saplings and bushes. Across the unmarked blacktop from the hospital’s grounds was more of the same. Its campus was slightly larger than two acres and most of that was taken up by a rear parking lot, which was also unmarked blacktop. The two wing, single story brown brick building sat on a scalloped rise. This structure’s black sheathed windows had thick lines of barren bushes planted in front of them. Naked ivy vines webbed its brick walls. It seemed to command its small domain.

There was no sign in front of the building. An odd address, something N, something W, appeared in large metal letters over the end windows on its left wing. ‘Indian Head Park Convalescent Neurological Sanctuary’ was in white painted letters on the blackened glass transom above its front revolving door.

It wasn’t entirely in a wilderness. A quarter mile away the loop emptied onto a four lane boulevard. There were power cables running alongside the blacktop roadway into it. Nedor Services had two while utility vans parked underneath poles in the vicinity.   

Nedor Services had reported that limos were no longer showing up at the hospital. The last of the  personnel had arrived about forty minutes ago. Just as I was getting ready at the zoom tube, Nedor ordered a sudden and immediate radio silence. They hadn’t said a thing since. That was all I knew.

Sulfur then reported that there was nothing extraordinary going on either inside or outside of the hospital, at least from what he could tell. He intended to meet me at the tube room, provided that I could guide him there once I showed up.

Two seconds after the zoom tube dumped me at the truck dock, I was able to solve one mystery. The hospital wasn’t going anywhere. Its outside was a shell, a covering for a quite contained interior. I had previously been informed that the facility was a space ship, but that only disclosed part of the story. It was the interior that was a space ship, manufactured in accordance with some rather standard designs. This matched the specifications of nearly every small drone freighter I had ever been inside, although scaled down.

That said, I don’t think Cole bought the thing. He had copied it from plans found in the library. The Old Man had impressive facilities when it came to all aspects of fabrication. He also had a flair for simplicity.

How did they mask the hospital’s disappearance? They put black plastic shades on all of the windows and locked the doors. That’s all they needed for outside security and that’s all they had.

“They are starting up the air,” Claudia reported through my helmet.

The iris of a cheapo prefab airlock had just sealed the truck dock behind me. Air pressure was starting to build up, as is typical for a space ship about to depart for the void. What wasn’t so typical was the interior hull’s lead casing or the rather aggressive cooling systems. Normally, space is cold. It seems that whatever scab universe we were about to escape into was warm and potentially radioactive. The lack of a propulsion system intrigued me. Another curious feature was the presence of powerful electromagnets, which were recessed within the interior and mounted on swiveling turrets. What kind of a place were we going to?

Wherever it was, they had been there hundreds of times, so I wasn’t that worried. This ship sailed in much the way many riverboat casinos do: from one designated place and back without variation. In spaceman terms, this type of ship was referred to as a point to point vessel. Much of the furniture I passed on my way to the tubes was screwed into the floor. There were plastic clamps on the surfaces of nearly every desk. The floor was covered in a thick tin sheath. I was ruling out the presence of an artificial gravity unit.

“Special Spaceman where are they now?” I asked Claudia.

“Dropping Dramamine. Washing it down with juice boxes. The chef says dinner will start with Lobster Bisque,” she answered.

The Sparky version of Royce Cole was still in the dining room, glad handing his assembly of imported veterinarians. There were twelve procedures scheduled for their eighteen hour tour into scab space. The trip would actually take only one hour of real time. A little post operative dinner celebration was planned at the ten hour mark.

The Old Man had sorted through all of the thousands of tubes stored in the library, performing a slow motion triage. All totaled, he had 423 aliens who were still alive, 78 of that number that he felt confident enough to operate on. I don’t know what his success rate was. He had just started on the procedures five years ago. Having a suspended animation facility at the hospital was the original purpose of the underground tube rotary.

Sparky didn’t have the Old Man’s medical skills, so he was hiring out. That may have always been a part of the plan. The Old Man had advanced medical training, but he was hardly a surgeon. I might be giving the Old Man too much credit by ascribing any altruistic motivation to his endeavors. But he had put in the time. He was very careful about what he was doing. All of the profits from his arms contracting—at least the portion that wasn’t shipped off to ten thousand plus relatives—went into this. For the past forty years, this was the Old Man’s work.

Sparky, I thought, was just going to sell the aliens. Maybe he could get more for them if they were alive? I have absolutely no proof of that.

I took the two flights of narrow concrete steps down to the tube vault. It was essentially a pool, sixty feet on a side, and covered in a foot thick, transparent plastic lid. Surrounding the pool and even in height with the lid was a wide painted concrete platform. Just to the right of the staircase was another one of Cole’s home brewed grey metal control desks, this one with a pair of conventional flat screens perched on top. There was no keyboard. Instead Cole used an array of flip switches, buttons and dials he had copied from some space faring standard. It was familiar enough to me. I could at least turn it on.

I heard the lurking hiss of  a pneumatics system. My correct initial guess was that it somehow fed the ten foot tall clear plastic upright chute sprouting from the pool lid’s center.

Claudia appeared on both of the video screens. She was hovering about the control array back in the hangar. Of course, it wasn’t the real Claudia. She had no functioning muscles and was missing a leg. The real Claudia would not have been able to make the trip from her perch by the brain boxes in the library, where she actually still was. Rather, this was a projection of Claudia, a creation of what cumulative library brain box power she had been able to channel. As she appeared, Claudia was exactly as I had left her, clad in a leatherette smock and decked out for her duties as a picker slave. This fit, since the controls themselves were only fifty feet from the lines she had previously worked.

Awareness of the brain box network had empowered Claudia. The rest was visualization. All humans are visual, but it seemed to me that Claudia took to it quickly and comprehensively. Or she could have triggered repairs to the automatic system that Sparky had messed up. At the moment I wasn’t sure if Claudia had manifested herself at the control station or whether she was simply overriding the controls in the hangar. The Claudia that existed on the video screen may have existed there and only there. She may not have known what anything was, but she could make it work. I’ll take that. I was due some luck here.

The controls at the tube vault lit up. I asked the screens “You feel this? This working?”

“Yep,” she said. “There are six hundred tubes. Some of them are empty. There’s a listing. I guess some of these are names.”

I wanted to release the humans. Injured aliens were going to do me no good. Bringing up an alien could potentially kill them. I told her “Look for names that could be people.”

“Sal Lieberman?” she asked, genuinely unsure if the subject was animal, vegetable or mineral.  

“Good start. Sal’s a person. Bring him up,” I said.

The room reverberated with a hollow thud. In the chute was an eight foot long tube containing watery freeze and a middle aged retired prison guard turned kosher butcher. Like Stan, he was a large, muscular man. For some reason, he was dressed in a grey flight suit.

How I was going to release Sal was an open question. There was no automated control to do this. This facility was not set up for rapid releases. If I had to, I would use the helmet’s sonic device to shatter the glass. That could prove both messy and dangerous.

I advanced on Sal’s tube with Toovy’s tool in my hands. This wasn’t the same type of tube that had been used in the library. The ones in the vault turned out to be of Cole’s own design.

There was a kick release on it. Depressing a bar on the base activated a mechanism which sent the tube shooting up. Water went splaying all over and Sal fell forward.

I caught him. The sogging wet Sal was out of it. He was conscious, but mesmerized. Once I dragged him away from the chute, he went slack and folded to the floor.

I would try to snap him out of it if I had the time. We had twenty minutes, at best. It would take me five minutes to get everyone out of here. I wanted to grab as many people as I could. Sal not being ambulatory was a problem. If they were all non ambulatory then this was a waste of time.

After Sal had cleared the chute, the tube started to lower. It reconnected with the base and then the whole unit  sank away with a pop. The chute was again empty.

“Anyone else? Other humans?” I asked Claudia.

“This one just got here. Miles Nasus?”

“That would be a nice one. Send him up.”

Two seconds later the tube containing Colonel Nasus appeared in the chute. I stepped forward and kicked the bar. The tube raced up and water cascaded away. Nasus blinked twice and was instantly steady on his feet.

“You never know who you’re going to run into,” I said to Nasus. “Pleasant seeing you again.”

“Not entirely pleasant,” he said, shaking out his sleeves. “This was an Armani suit.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to press you into service, Colonel.”

“My balls are wet.”

“Duly noted,” I said, guiding him away from the chute. The chute was again empty. I turned to the control desk and asked Claudia “Anyone else? More people? More names?”

“It’s hard to read,” she said. I don’t know what she was looking at. Worse, someone had been whimsical in assigning the names.

I asked “Goodman. I’m looking for two girls named Goodman.”

“I have a Goodman Bimbo and a Bimbo Goodman,” she reported.

“Try one,” I said.

“Which one?”

“Either one,” I answered. I turned to Nasus and said “Colonel, I’ll release her, then you grab her and take her away. The faster we work, the more people we can free. Understand?”

He responded “As much as I understand anything right now.”

Claudia reported “I have a lot of listings for Nedor Goon, Nedor Peon, Nedor Lacky and like that.”

“Try those. Those sound good,” I said. Claudia went on to list her other findings intermittently.

The Goodman girls were soon in our presence. They were awake. They were aware. The two slender young ladies were frightened nearly to the point of not being able to communicate, but they did what I told them to. My telling them that their parents had sent me was even parts reassuring and hallucinatory, delivered as it was by Cody’s stupid smiling face.

Our biggest bit of luck came in the form of the next two people freed, both Nedor Services men. Without much prompting or training, Jay and Conner took over for Nasus and myself. They very quickly came up with a more efficient method of extracting victims from the tubes. During one three minute stretch these two very able young men removed five people.  

I was helping Claudia sort wheat from chaff with the names as well as trying to snap Sal out of it. Miles was lining up our releases on the stairs. It was during this period that Miles told me what Sparky had said to him.

It confirmed what I had already discovered: that Sparky was responsible for the genocide on Tiamore. My summation “What a narrow motive for mass murder.”

“Most mass murderers don’t have a rational motive,” Miles said.

We had downgraded Sparky’s crimes from genocide to mass murder after discovering that there were six beings from Tiamore in the tube vault. Their designations were along the lines of Dog Person Pope, Dog Person Plutocrat, Dog Person Diplomat and such. It was only an assumption that they were alive. Maintaining the viable was the vault’s listed purpose.

Our operation was not flawless. We hit two major snags. Midway through, at about the ten minutes left mark, the vault network upchucked a Meteor Beast with the superfluous nomenclature of Joe Doaks. The creature’s tube was slightly oversized, which wasn’t a problem. The problem was that we had no automatic way of sending him back down. Our choice was to remove the entire tube or release him.

Joe was fairly crammed into the tube, his face plastered to the top and his freeze water murky with milky organ fluid. I took a chance and kicked the release. He spilled out and rolled. The creature was missing its arms, burned on both of the hips and had a huge surgical gouge in its spinal hump. It twitched, but otherwise didn’t indicate awareness. Conner, Jay and myself manhandled the thing away. It did stop twitching after a few moments and did seem to expire—if it were ever alive at all. We then went about the task of wrestling its tube and base out of the chute.

Our efforts ended abruptly a few minutes later with the appearance of a second alien. It was a young Zed male, in the day glow green and dull grey uniform of the Authorian Confederacy. If I read the rank markings on his hockey jersey-like uniform correctly, he was a Field Marshal. (A twenty year old Field Marshal?) The human’s mistook him for an albino member of their race. His blue hair, black deer eyes and bright yellow teeth gave them the impression that he was sick. He was injured, but his looks were normal for a Zed.

Zeds were so close to humans that I felt there was little risk in releasing him. They breathe air.  He wasn’t armed and he was too short to be a Starlord. (Starlords are always dangerous. If I suspected that he was one, we would have left him.) Once free of the water, he started barking up a storm. Roughly translated, he was assuring all of us that he was in charge and demanding that we remain calm. That’s probably a reflex for a civil defense field marshal.

He was  stationary in the chute and making too much noise. I uttered the only phrase I knew by heart in Authorian, which equates to: Whatever privilege was conveyed by the vagina you emerged from has now worn off.

His response: “Gonor, naroteen.”

He was one hundred and fifty years out of date, so I let that slide. It didn’t occur to me that he was injured until he attempted a one legged hop out of the chute. Maria Esperanza, whom Cole had designated Nedor Witch, swept in to grab him. A trained medic, Maria had spotted that the Field Marshal’s left femur was pointing in three different directions.

I knew we were out of time. Claudia then announced “Five minutes to shut down, seven minutes to launch.”

Everyone but me was on the stairs, with Conner and Jay carrying Sal, and Maria and Vomit Nedor Freak carrying the Field Marshal, taking up the rear.

Miles Nasus quickly, but calmly sidled down the steps and came up to me. He whispered “Problem. There’s someone upstairs.”

“Who?”

“Death?”

“I’ll take care of it. Let’s move.”

Miles pointed back to Claudia’s screens, asking “What about Trailer Trash? Where’s she?”

“May the sea of peace embrace her. Follow, Colonel.”

We headed to the stairs.

“You know, colonels shouldn’t be answering to captains.”

“Pull rank and we’ll both be answering to Field Marshall Barky back there.”

I left Nasus at the head of our column of released persons and bolted the final flight of stairs alone. Silhouetted above was a thin figure draped in a black shroud and holding a scythe to its shoulder. As if the people I had released weren’t frightened enough, the sight of my ally Sulfur was unlikely to aid in calming them down.

If I wanted him here I would have directed him to the vault in the first place. I was unclear as to what his appearance meant. Moreover, I wanted to preempt any lengthy interchange at this point. He did back up at my approach.

I waved him around a corner and he followed. It stood there with its eye sockets blinking as I explained “I have a way to send the library back to hell. We are going to hit Cole and then shut down the atorecs. Now, I need a couple of minutes. Hold here and I’ll be right back.”

Did he buy it? I don’t know. For some reason he stayed right there and out of sight. (The reason perhaps being that I asked him to.) I then called down to Miles.

The whole gang emerged from the staircase and we quickly snaked our way to the truck dock.

I was not able to trigger the airlock. We were now at ninety seconds until the event. I didn’t like the odds on hiding these people for twelve hours. My best bet was to get them out now. But the controls were… hidden, not apparent, not existent.

Worse, I heard the truck dock door starting to roll up. For a moment, I thought they were on to us.

Then Claudia reported “I unlocked the truck door. I’m rolling up the door. I think this is that camera shutter door thing.”

The iris folded away. My charges filed past, one by one, through the airlock, through the truck door and into the parking lot.

“Elvis, is that you?” came through on my helmet. It was Nedor Services.

I told them “Memphis Mafia is on the move.”

Nasus was last, trailing the carried field marshal. He halted in the dock, before the truck door. “Time to go, Elvis.”

“Claudia, close the camera thing,” I whispered.

“You’re on the wrong side of it,” she whispered back.

The intercom had started counting down starting at fifteen. They were now on five.

“We win. They lose. Come on, Elvis. Next week this time I’ll have you booked on Oprah,” Nasus continued.

If this String Theory I heard about recently were true, I’m certain that is what happened in the next universe. The short form is, we all lived happily ever after. My released prisoners deliver a testimony that the authorities can neither deny nor cover up. Cole’s organization is shattered and its facilities shut down. I spend the rest of my days making Miles Nasus a very rich man.

“Please close the shutter,” I whispered.

Nasus looked up at the door, which was starting to close. He jumped into the parking lot.

“Nice knowing you, Colonel,” I shouted as the airlock snapped shut in my face.    

End of my good deeds. The rest of this I would take back if I could.