the Devil's Workshop (1999) Read online

  "We ain't gonna get any money up here, man."

  "Then we gotta steal us somethin', car radio, or something we can sell," Lucky mumbled.

  Then they heard the first concussive "ca-whump," coming from far away down the valley.

  "What the fuck was that?" Mike blurted, jumping to his feet.

  "Beats me." Lucky was still sitting on his bedroll, with his back against a tree. He knew from experience that if he didn't get a drink, he would soon plunge into a terrible delusional nightmare.

  Then they heard two more loud "ca-whumps," and Lucky looked off toward the sound. "You know what that sounds like?" he finally said.

  "Uh-uh," Mike answered.

  "It's like when you turn on the gas and it won't light, and you leave it on, and 'whomp,' it finally catches."

  "Fuckin' A," Mike said, nodding. "That's exactly what it sounds like."

  Then they heard distant machine-gun fire, followed a few moments later by a loud crash and a huge explosion. The sound rolled like thunder up the valley. Lucky jumped to his feet as well. "That sounded like a chopper crash," he said, his mind momentarily distracted from the oncoming D. T. S.

  Then they heard several smaller explosions, almost like distant fireworks.

  Mike was scratching some mosquito bites on his arm, and they began bleeding. He wiped his arm against his pants and looked . over at Lucky, who was now moving farther up the hill.

  "Where you going?"

  "Up there, to that bluff. I wanna see what's going on."

  They both climbed farther up the mountain until they got to a mesa. Lucky moved across to the eastern edge, and from there he could see down to the town, almost three miles away. What he saw shook him badly. The whole shoreline was an inferno. One Blackhawk helicopter was still buzzing around down there like an angry dragonfly, moving out of the dark into the flickering firelight, then disappearing again into blackness. The distant whine and roar of the engine seemed far away on the night air.

  "Son-of-a-bitch," Lucky whispered. "They blew up the fuckin' town."

  While they were watching, the hardware store's roof crashed in. It took almost five seconds for the sound of the falling beams to reach them. Then in the distance they heard the sound of chattering gunfire.

  "Must be bullets exploding in the hardware store," Mike said.

  "Uh-uh," Lucky said, remembering his Marine training. "That's fifty-caliber. Like they got in the nose guns on that Blackhawk." He couldn't understand why that would be happening unless it was some kind of new alcoholic figment. "You see all this too, right?" he suddenly asked Mike.

  "Of course," Mike said, startled at the question.

  Suddenly, the gas station at the end of town went up in a ball of flame as the underground tanks blew. The explosion rattled their eardrums.

  "You know what I think?" Lucky said slowly.

  "What?"

  "I think it's time for us to catch out."

  "I can make it," Mike said, feeling his sore ribs.

  Lucky and Mike climbed back down the hill and picked up their bedrolls.

  "Shouldn't we do something?" Mike whispered in the darkness.

  "Whatta you wanna do, throw rocks?" They started climbing across the moonlit slope toward the Southern Pacific railhead, which was two miles away.

  "We're better off just gettin' outta here. We should take the SP up to Waco," Lucky said. "I need ta get my hands on a bottle. ... I'm gettin' one a' my whaddayacallits."

  Mike nodded his head. He'd been through one set of the D. T. S with Lucky, and it had scared the piss out of him.

  "Or maybe we catch out on the UP to California," Lucky said.

  He was talking again, trying to keep his mind off the imaginary spiders, as well as the horror of the fishing village on fire. Why was the chopper strafing the town? he wondered.

  One thing Lucky knew was that he was through being a hero. Then they heard more machine-gun fire directly up ahead.

  "What the hell is that?" Mike asked.

  "Shhhhh. Stay here," Lucky commanded, some remembered piece of his old life taking over. Lucky dropped his pack and moved toward the sound. It took him almost two minutes, forging through the thick forest, trying not to rustle leaves or branches or give away his position. Then he came to the edge of a tree line. In a meadow, about a hundred yards below him, he could see thirty armed men. They were shabbily dressed and looked to him, from a distance, like hobos. The headlights of an Army jeep, which looked like it had just had its tires shot out, lighted all the men. Two uniformed soldiers were lying facedown on the ground, while several of the hobos held guns on them. While Lucky watched, a tall, silver-haired man moved up to one of the facedown soldiers. He appeared to be talking to the man for a minute, and then, without warning, he pointed his pistol down and shot the soldier in the back of the head. The second soldier tried to rise, but the tall, silver-haired man put his foot on the back of that soldier's neck, pushing his face into the dirt. Then they appeared to have a lengthy conversation, all of it too far away for Lucky to understand. The prone soldier seemed to be talking fast, telling the silver-haired man something important. Then the man took his foot off the soldier's neck, stepped back, and shot him.

  Lucky was frozen by the two cold-blooded murders. He could still hear the remaining chopper wheeling, turning, and strafing the burning village. He wondered again if the whole thing was some sort of never-before-experienced hallucination, some alcohol-induced mind trick that was turning his world into an apocalyptic nightmare. Then, as he watched, the silver-haired man stood over the two dead soldiers and lifted his hands to the sky. It looked to Lucky as if he was praying over the bodies of the men he had just executed. It was crazy. He scrambled back to where Hollywood Mike was waiting.

  "What was it?"

  "Tell ya later," Lucky said grimly, as he grabbed up his backpack and bedroll. "C'mon, I wanna get outta here before the spaceship lands."

  The towering flames had spread all along the east side of the lake, and Stacy had to move fast to stay ahead of the inferno. In the darkness, she heard the rustle of animals fleeing from the fire. She was afraid she would run into the soldiers in the hills. She had caught occasional glimpses of the patrols before sunset. The dust plumed up from their speeding jeeps, marking their positions in the distance.

  Her camera was banging against her chest, her heavy backpack cutting into her shoulders as she grabbed onto rocks and pulled herself up a mountainous slope, to a spot where she could get a better look at the prison.

  She finally found a protected area, and was shocked when she looked back at the blaze. It now consumed hundreds of acres, burning out of control all over the mountains around the lake. Flames and glowing embers lit the night sky. She could feel the strange fire-induced winds swirling. In her nose was the heavy, sooty smell of burning trees.

  From where she was, she could look down into the prison. She put her Nikon up to her eye and, through the five-hundred-millimeter lens, she could see men moving around down there in the darkness. Two soldiers had huge canisters strapped to their backs. Others were moving in and out of the temporary low building in the center yard, carrying boxes out and putting them into trucks.

  She watched them for almost forty minutes. It was obvious to her that they were emptying the labs of any evidence. Stacy knew that this was going to be a huge national news story. There was no way they could cover it up--a whole town burned, a Blackhawk and its crew crashed, thirty or forty civilians killed, a raging forest fire out of control in East Texas. She wondered how Admiral Zoll and his team would attempt to spin it.

  She took a roll of long-lens shots of the men as they loaded the boxes of files and research onto the trucks. She hoped if she "pushed" the film in the lab, she would be able to get exposures in the low light. After the trucks were loaded, the men with the canisters on their backs moved up. Suddenly, streams of liquid flame shot out of the nozzles in their hands and into the buildings. The men deliberately moved around the structures, set
ting fire to all of them. She used another roll as the buildings burned.

  Then Stacy moved off the rocks and started to pick her way down, getting closer. She wanted faces. She wanted to get pictures that would allow the authorities to identify these people.

  Twenty minutes later, she was close enough to the prison to feel the increased heat from the fires burning in the yard. She could see the flames through a double razor-wired chain-link fence. She kneeled down in the dark, hoping she was out of sight of the soldiers. They had driven the trucks out of the yard and were now packing the crates that they removed from the center buildings into the remaining two Blackhawks, which were still parked on the makeshift baseball diamond.

  It was then that she saw Dexter DeMille. Admiral Zoll was leading him out of the prison's front gate. Dr. DeMille was walking on stiff knees, holding his left hand painfully. She thought he looked like a man being led to his own execution.

  They had come to his room at six o'clock in the evening. Without speaking to him, the two soldiers had put him in handcuffs, then moved him out of his living quarters across the yard to the huge tower in C-Block. Dexter had been forced to climb the metal stairs to the fifth tier, where Sylvester Swift and Troy Lee Williams had been held two days before.

  "Why are you doing this?" he had asked the stone-faced Rangers several times, but they refused to speak. He felt their strong hands on his arms, propelling him along the metal walkway and into one of the cells. The door was slammed and the lock buzzed shut.

  He sat there on the cold steel bunk with no mattress, and waited in fear. He had heard a huge explosion around eight o'clock and then the distant clatter of machine guns. He knew the whole thing was coming apart, and that he would probably die before the night was over. He sat there in the dark and cursed himself for the waste he had made of his once-promising life. Depression circled him like a cold, gray mist.

  At ten-thirty he looked up and saw Admiral Zoll standing in the corridor. It surprised him that he had not heard the huge man approach. The Admiral was in a tan uniform and a Navy flight jacket. His gold Navy wings glistened in the naked overhead light.

  "Dexter, I need your signature on something," Admiral Zoll said.

  Dr. DeMille looked up, fear gripping him. Admiral Zoll handed a single sheet of paper through the bars. Dexter took it, and held it up to the light to read:

  /, Dr. Dexter DeMille, take full responsibility for my actions. I cannot live with the consequences my research has brought. I know now my illegal work with Prions is ungodly and that I should never have pursued it. The accident here at Vanishing Lake was entirely my fault. Mosquitoes carrying PHpr got loose from my lab. Nobody at Fort Detrick knew of my work, and I take full responsibility. May God, and my country, one day see fit to forgive me.

  Dexter looked up at Admiral Zoll. "I don't think so," he said, handing the letter back.

  "Dr. DeMille, you are going to die tonight. The only question is whether you die easily or in great pain. Your time here is over. This paper will have no effect on you once you're gone, but I promise you, sooner or later you will end up signing it. Sooner would be easier."

  Dexter got up from the bed and backed up until he was standing against the far wall of the cell. "I won't sign it," he stammered. "It's a lie. This whole program is your doing."

  The Admiral nodded to Captain Zingo, who stepped forward and opened the door of Dexter's cell. He grabbed the frail scientist by his left hand and, finding a pressure point on the nerve between his thumb and index finger, pressed down hard and shot a bolt of agonizing pain up Dexter's arm to his shoulder.

  Dexter screamed.

  "Captain Zingo knows every nerve point in the body." Then Zoll nodded, and Zingo repeated the pressure.

  This time Dexter's knees collapsed; the agony it caused was so excruciating he could barely stay conscious. He withstood the torture for only three minutes before he begged them to stop.

  He was sobbing as he signed his name to the document.

  Admiral Zoll, Nick Zingo, and the two Delta Rangers led Dexter DeMille out the front gate of the prison. He walked on rubbery legs. Over his shoulder, he could see his labs on fire in the main yard. Then Admiral Zoll got into one of the loaded helicopters, and without saying another word to Dexter, closed the hatch. The Blackhawk started. The blades began stirring the air around them. As the rotors spun faster, several of the soldiers covered their eyes from the flying dust and small rocks. The huge helo lifted off. Once airborne, it dropped its nose and whisked Admiral Zoll away into the firelit night.

  Stacy was down to her last roll of film. Besides Dexter DeMille, there were only five men and one Blackhawk left on the baseball diamond. She moved along behind the brush line, crouching in the dark, shooting as many shots as she could through the tall grass.

  Then she watched in horror as Nick Zingo pulled his nine-millimeter Beretta and pointed it at Dexter. She could hear Dr. DeMille pleading as he stood there helpless, his voice tinny and shrill as it came across the baseball diamond. Stacy froze, the camera forgotten for a moment in her hand. Suddenly gunfire erupted from the third-base side of the diamond. Captain Zingo's chest was instantly riddled with red blots.

  Dexter spun around in confusion as gunfire erupted from behind home plate. One by one, the soldiers in the compound fell, clutching at their wounds, unable to even get their weapons free.

  Stacy shrank back behind the foliage in horror. Only Dexter was left standing.

  Then she saw a tall, silver-haired man step out of the darkness. With him were half a dozen more men. All of them wore grimy overalls; most were holding automatic weapons. She could see that each had the same tattoo in black letters across his right biceps: F. T. R. A. The silver-haired man walked to where Dexter was standing. They were only twenty feet from her.

  "I told you we were gonna be friends," the silver-haired man said.

  "He was going to kill me," Dexter stammered. "How did you know?"

  "I know all about you, brother. Your coming is foretold in Revelation."

  "What?" Dexter asked, confused.

  " 'One of the four beasts gave unto the seven angels seven golden vials full of the wrath of God,' " Fannon quoted. " 'The first angel poured out his vial onto the earth, and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon them which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshiped his image' " Fannon smiled at Dexter. "You an' me, we're gonna pour some a' that wrath you been cookin' outta your vial onto the earth. We're gonna destroy the lower races. Niggers and Jews. Whatta you think a' that, bub?" Then Fannon took Dexter by the elbow, and along with his band of armed hobos, he led the bewildered microbiologist off the baseball diamond.

  As they passed, Stacy Richardson used her last exposure on a firelit close-up of Fannon Kincaid.

  Chapter 13

  CATCHING OUT

  He's dropping air," Lucky said, after the freight crested the pass. They could hear air brakes hissing, indicating the engineer was slowing for the long downhill grade ahead. The freight crested the pass and began rumbling down the northern range of the Black Hills. The diesel engine was a big black-and-orange SD 45-2 high-hood road locomotive. "These were used by the Denver Rio Grande Railroad for long hauls," Lucky said, realizing that probably meant it was a "mixed" train containing a variety of different kinds of cars. Lucky was "scoping the drag," looking for one that would be easy for Mike to board with his broken ribs. Thankfully, the onset of D. T. S had subsided for the moment, killed by the exertion of climbing the rugged terrain to the rail, or by the earlier jolt of adrenaline as he watched the two soldiers die. But Lucky's stomach was rolling. For the last hour he'd felt as if he was about to throw up.

  They were in a perfect place to catch out. The train had slowed to five miles an hour at the mountain pass. Lucky and Mike were crouched low, out of sight, as the big yellow MoPac diesel rumbled by. Then came a long line of piggyback cars, known as "pigs." Lucky was looking for a sleeper, because often one was left between two long lines of the sam
e kind of cars. Not this time. The fifteen pigs rumbled past immediately followed by twenty stack cars, not good for hoboing. The double-decker stacks were thickly loaded with huge metal containers, which often shifted and had crushed more than one sleeping 'bo. Then came a dozen closed grainers, followed by a line of gondolas.

  "About to get boned here," Lucky murmured. "Shoulda caught one a' them pigs."

  They were running out of train when he finally saw a few "ledged grainers" coming toward them. They were old cars, not very common anymore, characterized by a narrow ledge on each end just wide enough to sit on. It wasn't the best option, but at least it was an easy car to get on.

  "Okay, let's take the green one, second old grainer after the row of reds," Lucky said. He held his hands out in front of him to check his nerves. His hands were shaking badly. "Shit, these fuckers are comin' back," he muttered.

  Mike didn't answer. When Lucky looked over at him he saw a strange, troubled look in Hollywood Mike's eyes.

  "Let's go!" Lucky said. They took off running up the tracks. Lucky sprinted along next to the car, trying to find his coordination, which was just about lost now. He was feeling awkward, as his neurons and muscles trembled inside his body, on the verge of turning on him, attacking his voluntary nervous system. Lucky grabbed the ladder handle with his left hand and swung himself up onto the small ledge at the back of the car. He moved over as Mike grabbed the handle, gritting his teeth in pain. Lucky grabbed Mike's shirt, and with great effort, finally hauled him aboard.

  They were now sitting backward, looking at the front of the grain car behind them. The tracks were flashing past; under their feet the huge metal coupling was groaning and creaking with the changing stress of the car.

  "How's the ribs?" Lucky asked, his own nerves rioting in his alcohol-ravaged system. Again, Mike didn't answer.