Free The Soul Collectors by Chris Mooney Page A

the man step behind the doctor. There was no talking – at least nothing she could hear. The man seemed to be consulting something on the computer screen. He stepped away, disappearing from her view.
    A moment later she heard the ceiling speaker crackle.
    ‘How are you feeling?’
    The voice of the hazmat man she’d first encountered.
    ‘So far, so good,’ Darby replied. ‘Can you hear me, Sergeant-Major Glick?’
    ‘I can hear you fine. Any problems breathing?’
    She nodded. ‘I think I fractured some ribs.’
    ‘We’ll give you a chest X-ray and then treat them when we get you to our hospital. What about nausea?’
    ‘No. What’s the army doing at BU?’
    ‘Consulting.’
    ‘On what?’
    ‘Various governmental matters that don’t concern you.’
    ‘Then maybe you can tell me about the man I left in the woods. What’s his condition?’
    ‘I wish I could tell you.’
    Darby swallowed. Her eyes narrowed. ‘If you want my cooperation, you better drop the bullshit and –’
    ‘No, you misunderstood me,’ Glick said. ‘I can’t tell you anything about it because we didn’t find him. We didn’t find anyone in those woods, Miss McCormick, not a single person.’

16
    Mark Rizzo started to drift back from the darkness of his mind only to encounter a new kind of darkness, one that was pitch black and smelled dank and musty. Something cold and hard and flat pressed up against the bare skin of his chest, thighs and arms. Every inch of his skin felt cold. Then he knew: he had been stripped of his clothes.
    He turned his hand and his fingers felt rough stone.
    A stone floor, damp and dirty.
    Chilly air.
    Dark air that smelled dank and musty.
    No … Oh dear God in heaven please don’t let this be true.
    Adrenalin shot through his weary heart, flushing his skin and then … then it died. His muscles were unresponsive, and, while his mind felt thick and clogged, his thoughts sluggish, he had memories, fragments of them, and he remembered choking on the tear gas filling his bedroom and watching SWAT officers rush in and thinking, Thank God, oh thank God it’s over . But one of the SWAT officers had a syringe and he remembered feeling the needle sink deep into his neck. Remembered trying to break free of the restraints binding him to the chair when he heard the first gunshot –
    Mark Rizzo blinked the image away. He knew who had him now – and they were somewhere here in this pitch-black darkness. He could hear breathing.
    A voice boomed through the darkness:
    ‘Welcome home, Thomas.’

PART TWO
    The Cross
    17
    Darby lay propped up in the hospital bed with her hands folded behind her head, staring across the room at the clear Plexiglas door. Beyond it was a small, square-shaped area of spotless white tile. It covered the floor, walls and ceiling. The door in there was made of steel.
    Two doors, both locked, both secured by keycard readers. You needed a card and a separate code for each door. Each person who came in here had a different set of codes. Some punched in three numbers. Others had six. One doc had seven.
    She had stopped thinking about how to mount an escape. Even if she managed to grab a keycard from one of the docs or lab technicians who came in here to draw blood and then pump a cruiser-load of dope into her system, there was still the issue of the codes, and even with those there was the problem of whatever lay beyond these two doors. The BU Biomedical building, where she was currently quarantined, no doubt had top-notch security. A stolen keycard ( and the codes, don’t forget the damn codes ) would get her only so far; they wouldn’t open whatever doors separated her from the outside world. Then there was the staff to deal with, and guards – army boys, probably.
    Would they shoot her? Unlikely. Would they Mace her or use something like a Taser? Most definitely.
    Escaping wasn’t an option.
    Her thoughts shifted to the reasons why she wanted to leave here: the staff refused to let her use