We stop for dinner in a strip mall in a small city a couple of freeway exits before we get to Wallace Hospital. I would have gone for Chinese, but Yang Song vetoes it, saying the Americanized version is never good. We compromise on Thai food and end up in a place that looks like a dive but has some pretty decent curry. Lin’s got a little bit of a dreamy look. I’m not sure how much of it is from the catharsis of her talk with Yang Song and how much is from the ring that she keeps looking at and feeling. I turn on my overlay and see that she’s looking down at it through her glowing green eyes and making tiny modifications to the setting. Good, I want her to be happy with it.
We’re done with dinner just in time for closing, which should get us to Jeff’s institution late enough that it’ll be nice and dark. We should be able to get pretty close and park somewhere where I can do a remote reach in, hopefully without anyone noticing us. I have Yang Song take the wheel as we get back in the car. She warns me that she’s still not licensed here, but she’s a good driver and it’s a quiet night. She’s going the speed limit, so there’s no reason she should get pulled over for anything.
“You’re all set for guard duty?” I confirm with Lin.
“Yes. The sentry routine is easy to use. I’ll see anyone coming, if they come.”
Yang Song takes the exit to Greenstown, a small, mostly agricultural community. According to my index, its biggest claims to fame are the quality of their lemon orchards and being the home of the Wallace Hospital, one of the most prestigious mental health institutions in the world. The small town has a single traffic light and an aesthetic that makes me think that it hasn’t changed much in the last century. At the corner where we turn to head to the hospital, there’s even a big old-fashioned house with a wide porch with a large man in overalls sitting in a rocking chair sipping a drink. He could have walked right into an old black-and-white movie and looked every bit the part of the farmhand. The illusion is only broken when he pulls out his mobile phone as we pull away.
Small towns are weird.
The street heading to the hospital is tree-lined and would probably be picturesque during the daytime. I stretch my cloud out as Yang Song drives at the slow speed limit of the small two lane road. The park-like grounds of the hospital are extensive and enclosed with a tall brick wall. I penetrate the interior and see that the lobby is lavishly furnished. It feels more like a high-end hotel than a hospital. Past the front desk there are recreational areas, some with unfinished paintings still on their easels, some with circles of very comfortable looking chairs clearly for group therapy. The rooms where I feel most of the patients sleeping look very comfortable, maybe because there are no hard surfaces available anywhere in them.
All in all, it looks like a pretty nice place. Part of me feels good that we didn’t just throw Jeff in a hole to rot, though that’s kind of what I feel like he deserves now. Not that I’ll have that option next time I meet him. He’s much too dangerous to leave alive.
“We’re close enough,” I tell Yang Song. “Pull over whenever you find a good spot, please.”
I finally find what look like the offices for the doctors as the car pulls onto the narrow shoulder of the road. There is a row of filing cabinets in each office. Yeah, as we thought, they still use old fashioned paper records. Everything about this town feels so old. I have no idea which doctors might have worked with Jeff, so I start popping open locks and looking at files in several offices at once. It would have been nice to just be able to read the documents in place, but there’s not a good way to get enough light to read by while the pages are pressed together. I pull files out of the cabinet drawers just enough to read patient names. At least things are organized alphabetically.
Reading out of multiple eyes at once and actually understanding what I’m reading is a demanding task. Louise was right, this isn’t something I could do while keeping a good lookout. I finally find files for Jeff in three different offices and pull them onto desks so I can get enough light on them to get them scanned in. The notes are copious. The files for Jeff are substantially thicker than most of the patient files in the cabinets. I start taking images of the notes, page by page, no longer bothering to try to understand them. We can figure out meanings later. One of the offices has a window with moonlight streaming in, which I take advantage of, but the other two have very low light levels that makes getting images for the pages take a while. Better to go slow than to risk alerting anyone by creating a light in there, though.
Once I’m in a steady groove, I try reading a little as I go, but the notes are mostly hand-written and none of my optical character recognition software is working on them. Trying to decipher three different doctor’s scrawls by looking with my bot eyes while simultaneously making copies is just too much. Besides, Louise is probably right, I shouldn’t push my brain more than I need to. It’s a nice, quiet night. Lin’s hand snuck into mine at some point, and Yang Song hasn’t yelled at me for it. We’ve got plenty of time. No reason to damage myself now. We can get everyone to help read through the notes back at campus.
Several more minutes pass in silence. I finish copying the thinnest of the three files and stash it back in its cabinet, carefully relocking the drawer. The other two stacks of papers go a little faster now. Another ten minutes and the second one is done. Lin gives my fingers a little squeeze and pulls her hand away. I glance over and see that she’s alternating between looking all around alertly and admiring her new ring. I focus on the scans, getting several pages at a time on that last file. Almost done, we should be out of here soon.
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“Noah,” Lin says suddenly, “trouble!”
That jolts my focus back to my body. I look around, not seeing anything.
“Where?” I ask.
“They just stopped behind us, a long way back” she says. The panic in her voice makes her Chinese accent re-emerge for the first time in a long time. “Big car. Just a driver. Long guns inside, a couple of them.”
I fling my cloud back that way. I’m impressed that Lin felt the car approaching this far out. It’s over a kilometer down the road. I get my bots to it just in time to get the sense of a high powered rifle being steadied on the rolled down window of the open driver side door of a large SUV. I feel the small part of my cloud still near me rushing to form a mass between me and the gun, a point shield. I feel the prick of bots being crushed and then a sting across my cheek, as the bullet is just deflected enough to avoid putting a hole in my head. A split second later I hear the distant report of the shot. Only something with a lot of power would stay that close to target after going through my shield, especially at this range. The rear windshields is a spiderweb of cracks.
“Down!” I shout, pushing Lin onto the floor below the back seat.
I focus the sparse field of my bots near the SUV in on the rifle and get enough of them flooded in around its firing pin to disable it, but not before I hear and feel two more shots. My point shields are bigger and better positioned this time as more of my cloud has flooded back near my body from the hospital. Both bullets skim past the car without touching us.
“Stay here,” I shout to Lin and Yang Song as I dive from the car. I start by sprinting but soon I have enough bots to encase myself in a flight suit. I blast back towards the SUV, enfolding the sniper in an immobilizing mesh of bots as I go. By the time I arrive, he’s struggling face down on the ground, arms bound behind his back, legs together and bent back so that his ankles reach nearly to his hands.
I take a look at our assailant. He’s well-muscled, with a stylized leaf tattoo on his left bicep. I check him for anything identifying, but he’s got nothing but the clothes on his back, half a dozen long bullets, and his car keys on him. No wallet, no phone. From the look of him and how he made the shot from that distance, I’d say he’s military or former military. The gun is serious hardware. My index flags it as a TAC-50 sniper rifle. That thing would have made short work of me if I’d been focusing more of my cloud forward into the hospital or if Lin hadn’t shouted her warning.
“Who hired you?” I bark at him.
He just grunts and continues to struggle against his nearly invisible bonds.
“Who hired you?” I shout again.
He lifts his head and I see the many scars on his face and a sneering grin that tells me he doesn’t fear me in the least. He mutters a curse and tries to flip over.
I reach my bots into his mouth. His tongue is already reaching back towards his rear molars so I bind that up and start extracting all four of them. I don’t know if there’s redundancy on the trigger that I suspect is there, so I’m not taking any chances. He screams. It turns out it’s just in the right top one, and that’s on the ground now. I nudge it to the side with my foot, getting it far enough away from him so that no amount of struggling will let him get near enough to do anything with it, but not so far that if it has a proximity switch on it that it would trigger and let him have the quick escape of suicide.
“Who hired you?” I say, more calmly this time as I release his slippery tongue from my cloud’s grasp. A cold rage that feels as familiar as an old pair of shoes creeps over me. “I had to take those teeth, and you know why, but we can do some more if you don’t want to cooperate.”
“Tall, skinny guy,” he says. “Don’t know his name, don’t care, but he looked kind of like you.”
Jeff. Of course Jeff. The big guy flexes and squirms some more, but my chains made of bots aren’t going anywhere.
“How can I contact him?”
“You can’t,” he says between more curses.
I pry out the next four of his molars to the sound of his screams.
“You’ve got a lot of teeth left, and I only need a few answers. You wouldn’t have taken this job without a way to get paid for it. How were you going to contact him for payment?”
He just grunts and swears again so I start pulling the next four teeth from the back.
“Ow! Stop!” he cries out, spitting blood and teeth. “I don’t know. Otis has the number.”
“Who’s Otis? Where can I find him?”
I resume the pressure pulling on his teeth in case he has any ideas about holding out. Tears are streaming down his cheeks from the pain. He hesitates a moment more and loses the four teeth. I start on the next set.
“OK, OK!” he cries out, spitting molars. “He’s back in town. Big house on the corner, huge front porch, you can’t miss it.”
The farmhand with the phone.
“Big guy? Wearing overalls today?”
“Yeah.” He spits blood. “That’s him.”
“Thanks,” I say.
WARNING! NOREPINEPHRINE/SEROTONIN LEVELS INDICATE MURDEROUS INTENT! THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU KILL ANYONE!
I ignore the warning and take grim satisfaction in dissolving him from the outside in as he screams. Sorry Mom. I know I shouldn’t take pleasure in this, but I can’t help feeling that I’m doing the world a favor by getting rid of someone who shouldn’t be on this planet. I scrub the red puddle from the asphalt and spread the matter from his body that I couldn’t assimilate into the soil around the trees lining the road.
I turn my cloud to the task of dissolving the SUV and soon the air around me is thick with my bots. Another few moments, and any signs that the man, the vehicle, or the gun were ever here are gone without a trace.