The Boss glanced up the hallway of the stripped down basement. With soft squeaks of his leather soled dress shoes against the painted concrete, the Boss crossed the hallway to the vault-like door of the morgue. If Huckley was right, the other side of the door was his salvation, the culmination of a lifetime of work.
He punched in a special code and slid back the stainless steel door. Air whooshed out from the seal, as if the morgue had been holding its breath just for his arrival. He stepped into the cool room, the smell of antiseptic rising up from the shiny linoleum floor.
The Boss closed the door behind him and locked it in place. With one hand on the metal door, he held himself still, even skipping the next two breaths to ensure absolute silence. Perfect. He couldn’t hear a sound. Satisfied, he walked over to drawer number ten, the bottom right hand corner of the wall of temporary resting places for the dead of Midland and surrounding communities. He’d had enough of dead people recently. Too many of them, and not the right ones. He was looking for life in drawer number ten. He dragged it open. Empty. Just as he expected.
He pulled the drawer all the way out until it hit the stops, like an office filing cabinet. The Boss knew he could crawl through the opening with the drawer still in the wall, but he was a large man so he disengaged the drawer and hefted it to the side. On his hands and knees, he pushed himself into the space in the wall, elbowing his way to the back. His body wedged tightly into the space and blocked the light from the room behind him, but he knew what he was doing. He found the small clasp on the panel in front of him, twisted it, and opened the hatch.
The space beyond was another drawer just like the one he now lay in, except warmer. It had to be. Sometimes they needed to keep bodies here for days until they were ready to be taken out of the hospital. Stored at the cold temperatures, the people could never be kept alive for long. It was also brightly lit by a row of halogens recessed into either side of the compartment, giving it the look of a food warmer at a restaurant. The Boss knew the lights were triggered by the door opening and that usually the drawer was dark as any grave, especially because the thick sound proofing ensured no ambient light made its way in. Some of the people, put here when they were drugged, woke up in a panic and screamed for hours.
The Boss had tapes of it. The more interesting ones decided that they had died and that the darkness was the afterlife purchased by their sins. An eternity of black night, sitting in your own waste, hungry, thirsty, praying for salvation until you went insane. The Boss guessed that if released, the people who ended up in that drawer would have had a new appreciation for both life and religion. Of course, he would never have allowed a person to be released from the drawer, but it was a thought.
The Boss stared at the small form sleeping in front of him. The drug administered to her was strong enough that she wouldn’t wake up until after they moved her. He wished Huckley understood more clearly why the Source wanted this particular girl.
The Boss knew he had to trust Huckley’s intuition on these matters. The fact that Huckley delivered the message as an apparition while he was in a coma gave his opinion on the supernatural added credibility.
Remembering Huckley’s appearance caused a shudder to pass down his spine. Even with everything the Boss had been through, the sight had shaken him, not only because of the complete supernatural strangeness of it, but for the first time ever, he had been afraid of Huckley. Afraid of what he was becoming. Afraid that his own power no longer matched that of his underling. Looking at the blond haired girl sleeping in front of him, he found it hard to believe that she represented the key to understanding the Source.
Free from limits, was what Huckley had said the Source had promised. She will set us free from limits forever.
But what did it mean? That sacrificing her would yield a serum so powerful they could stop the ritual? Or did it mean they would finally have true immortality, where no weapons could kill them? The most exciting possibility, the grail which the Boss had been chasing for nearly three centuries, was to be able to reproduce the serum himself. To, in effect, become the Source.
All guesses. In reality, none of them knew what free from limits meant and they wouldn’t until they sacrificed her in the cave. Regardless of how it turned out, whatever free from limits meant, the Boss had decided this was the last adventure for his psychic friend. Huckley had served him well, his abilities were even the reason they found the cave to begin with, but now he was becoming too strong, too independent. And no one should be more powerful than the Boss. It was unacceptable.
With a shaking hand, the Boss reached out and stroked the sleeping girl’s hair. He let his fingers dance over her face, touching her closed eyes, nose, then brushing against her slightly parted lips. He closed his eyes and tried to sense the power inside the small body.
There was nothing at first, at least he thought it was nothing. He assumed the hum in his ears was from the lights right next to him, but slowly the noise grew. He resisted the urge to withdraw his hand and listened, not only with his ears, but with every sense he possessed.
The hum throbbed in a steady rhythm until the Boss realized he was hearing the blood moving through the girl’s veins.
Then a bolt of electric pain tore through his arm.
His eyes opened and the world turned white, as if a photographer’s flash had erupted inside his eye.
Another bolt of pain screamed up his arm and embedded itself deep into the center of his brain.
A hundred white flash bulbs went off until the world was purple with the after-effect.
The Boss cried out. Rising up too fast, he slammed his head into the metal ceiling of the drawer. He fought to remove his hand from the girl, but couldn’t move it. The shafts of pain continued, one after the other, the same strong hum from before, the girl’s heartbeat.
Using his free hand, the Boss rammed his frozen arm at the elbow joint. The arm doubled over and his hand fell away from the girl’s face.
The Boss lay still for a few seconds, panting hard from the pain, glowing circles still dancing across his vision. Once his strength returned, he pulled the latch shut and shimmied out of the morgue drawer as fast as he could. He didn’t understand what had just happened, but he sensed that the girl had almost killed him. And he couldn’t have been happier. She was unlike anything he had even encountered, Huckley was right about that.
Free from all limits. The Boss didn’t care what the risks were, he had to find out what that phrase meant. He had to find out soon.
FIFTY-NINE
The trees rushed past in a blur of motion. Jack held on tightly as the Bronco bumped down the gravel trail leading back to the main road. The overalls from his muddy climb up through the cave lay in the back; the earthy smell of them permeated the cab. The climb out had been quick even though the tight spots were more challenging working against gravity. But he was a fast learner and the technical aspects of climbing through holes were the same going up or down. Besides, the way down had been a hesitant path to the unknown, while the journey up was spurred by the promise of fresh air and open space.
And the fear that Huckley really did have his little girl.
He tried to make himself believe it wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true. Huckley was in a coma at Midland hospital. Lauren and the kids had left that morning and were going straight to Baltimore. Even assuming that the ghostly apparition of Huckley was real — which, outside of the cave and back in the real world, Jack found harder to believe — there wasn’t even the opportunity for Sarah to be taken. Not unless the men stopped them on the open road out of town. But that seemed too audacious, even if these men were as intent on getting Sarah as Lonetree said they were. Then again, what wasn’t audacious about the events of the last two days? Was anything really out of the realm of possibility?