The Scrubs Read online

  “Why?”

  “Well, the possibilities are endless. We may not just be looking the working mind of a sociopath, but at the secrets to time travel or inter-dimensional travel. It’s all beyond me. All I know is that it’s quantum leap technology.”

  Time travel…inter-dimensional travel…quantum leap technology, it was bollocks. Cady didn’t believe a word of it and he had the feeling that O’Keefe didn’t either. He was just talking the talk. This seemed to be a dog and pony show for Cady’s benefit. What was O’Keefe’s crack about telling Saunders that they’d be online before the end of the year? There was something O’Keefe wasn’t telling him.

  “You don’t see it that way, do you?” Cady asked. “Jeter means something else to you entirely.”

  O’Keefe smiled approvingly. “You’re right. I don’t just see an opportunity for science.”

  Cady had been under O’Keefe’s tutelage for only a few months, but the governor’s reputation preceded him. O’Keefe saw prisoners as resources to be used--and abused. He volunteered his prison for every whacked out research program going and for his pioneering spirit, he possessed the highest rate of inmate fatalities of any prison in the European Union.

  “If not for science,” Cady said, “then what?”

  “Entertainment.”

  “Excuse me?” Cady said, not believing what he’d just heard.

  “If we can get the Rift under control, it could be the greatest virtual reality game the world has ever seen. Imagine it, you get to go inside someone else’s reality and go head-to-head with it. Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, they would be history.”

  “But you’ve only got Jeter.”

  “Not for long. If we can master his powers and find others like him, we can replicate their minds artificially and create simulations based on their thought patterns. We’re looking at a multi-billion pound business.”

  “What kind of game?”

  “We’re talking about Jeter. What kind of game do you think?”

  “The worst kind.”

  “And those eighteen to twenty-four year olds would love it.”

  “You said Keeler was a guinea pig. Why have you really sent him in there?”

  “To see if he can survive.”

  “So this has nothing to do with finding Lefford and Allard?”

  O’Keefe shook his head. “I doubt they’re alive. We lost contact with them almost immediately. At this point, we’re trying to establish telecommunication links inside the Rift. Once we achieve that then we’ll be set.”

  “How close are you to achieving that?”

  “A couple of months off. We’ll probably have to send in a couple more inmates.”

  “But how far are you from getting Jeter under some form of control?” Cady asked.

  O’Keefe sagged. “That part is going to take considerable time.”

  “So what are Keeler’s chances of making it back?”

  “With the brain Jeter’s got,” O’Keefe said more to himself than to Cady. “It’s got to be slim to nothing. It’s a slaughterhouse in there.”

  Chapter Three

  The Rift

  The air smelled wrong on the other side of the Rift. Keeler couldn’t put his finger on it. It didn’t possess a smell as such, but when he inhaled, an unpleasantness clung to the inside of his head. Breathing through his mouth didn’t help either. The irregular air had substance and it coated his tongue. He waved his hand through the air and it came away damp. Whatever tainted the air had an immediate effect. Thick and cloying, it attacked his respiratory system. His lungs struggled to process it, but it had no problem reaching his brain. It’s heady quality made him unsure of his footing. He felt like he was sloshing around inside a bottle of that crap O’Keefe had made him drink.

  Keeler held up a shielding hand to stare into the sky and the hazy brightness. He should have been staring into the harsh afternoon sun, but there was no sun. This world seemed to be lit everywhere at once. Shadows couldn’t exist here. This is getting more Alice in Wonderland by the second, he thought.

  Voices from the North Wing faded. Keeler whirled. The Rift was still there, but it no longer reflected the goings on in the North Wing. The opening he’d stepped through was now a shimmering haze distorting the view of the open countryside. He didn’t like to think he was on a one-way ticket. He guessed, even believed, he had only to step back through the haze to end up back in the Scrubs. He thought about trying his theory out, but there wasn’t much point. If he tried, O’Keefe would only shove him back through. And for all he knew, stepping through the Rift might throw him into in another world. He’d screwed himself over.

  He tugged the mobile phone off his belt and switched it on. No reception. It wasn’t a surprise. He didn’t have high hopes for the camcorder, but tried it anyway. He switched it on and filmed a three hundred and sixty degree panning shot of fields stretching out in all directions. He stopped the recording and played it back. Through the viewfinder he watched thirty seconds of static. What does that mean? he thought. He tossed the useless electronics.

  “Now what?” he asked himself.

  He was inside Jeter’s warped brain without a map looking for two convicts. In God’s name, what did O’Keefe think he was going to find? It was a farce.

  Having no clue where Lefford and Allard could be hiding out, Keeler had everywhere to go and nowhere to start. He surveyed faded green field after faded green field. They reminded him of boyhood summer holidays spent in the Cotswolds, endless days spent following nothing but the end of his nose. In those days, he had believed he could be anything. A career criminal had never been one of those choices. Not that he could remember what he’d wanted to be back then. He just knew he’d never wanted to be a killer.

  He shook off the ideas filling his head. He wasn’t a boy and this wasn’t the Cotswolds. He trudged towards the only landmark he could see, a small enclosure of trees about two miles distant.

  Thoughts of Jeter, Lefford and Allard’s crimes reminded him of his own. Why did that screw have to bring up the kid? He hadn’t meant to kill Tim Mitchell. It was an accident, an armed robbery gone bad. Christ, if he could take it back, he would. Even now, three years into his stretch, not many nights went by without him replaying events. How had it gone so bad so quickly?

  The smash ‘n’ grab should have gone as it had time and time before. Keeler conducted himself no differently from the other six successful robberies. He raided only bank sub-branches because they weren’t as securely maintained as the more important high street branches. The places were as easy to knock over as a house of cards. On-staff security was non-existent, and the alarm systems were a couple of generations off from state of the art. They were so simple he worked them alone, leaving the car running on the street. The Brentford sub-branch of Lloyd’s Bank should have been no different, but Tim Mitchell changed that when he shot at Keeler.

  Tim hadn’t possessed a cap gun or one that fired a cork fastened to the barrel with a piece of string like Keeler had adored when he was a kid. No, little Tim’s parents had bought him a replica 9mm pistol that played a recording of an actual gunshot when the trigger was pulled. In the confusion of the raid, with the security alarm wailing, Keeler had thought he was being shot at and he’d swung around with the sawn-off and opened up on the seven year-old, removing his grin and most of his face with the contents of a single shell. The boy fell back, bringing down a blood splattered leaflet carousel bearing the bank’s black horse logo.

  With Tim’s mother screaming a scream that could only be replicated in his nightmares, Keeler had stood there wishing he could suck the buckshot back into the shotgun until a customer pounced on him. A man dressed in a bland Marks and Spencer suit came at Keeler with hungry hands eager to tear Keeler’s head from his shoulders. The man’s middle-of-the-road attire clashed with the ferocity of his attack as he brought Keeler down. Although numb from nearly decapitating the boy, Keeler fought back to save his own sorry life. He turned the shotgun on Mr.
Marks and Spencer and fired, emptying the second cartridge into the man’s chest. Bits of the man struck the foam ceiling tiles and Keeler watched the blood drip from the ceiling while he waited for the cops to come.

  Although an accident, Keeler couldn’t erase what he’d done and he pleaded guilty to everything the prosecution wanted to throw at him. He accepted his punishment and said thank you when they were finished. There were some things you didn’t fight.

  “Tim, why couldn’t you have been at school that day?” Keeler murmured to himself and blinked away the memory.

  Reaching the wooded area, Keeler weaved his way between the trees to discover a mini-oasis. The trees ringed a crystal blue pond. The tranquil spot drained away Keeler’s tension. His head still throbbed from the absinthe O’Keefe had given him and the water looked tempting. He dropped to his knees at the pond’s edge and sloshed water over his face, hoping to dislodge his headache.

  The water, like everything else in Jeter’s brain damaged world, was wrong. It was water and it wasn’t. It was oily and greasy to the touch, but it flowed through Keeler’s fingers and off his face like water. It may not have been tap quality, but it was no less refreshing and Keeler dunked his head in the pond. His vision failed to cut through the murk. Particles drifted by, tugged along by an unseen current, glinting in the dark waters. Just out of range, something more substantial glided towards him. He squinted to make out what it was, but he didn’t recognize it until a hand brushed against his face. He gasped, sucking in a mouthful of water. A fetid odor filled his nose--not the sourness of stagnant water, but the rankness of bad meat. He recoiled from the pond, collapsed onto his back then staggered away on all fours.

  A young woman, no more than nineteen and naked, bobbed face down on the surface of the pool, a languid arm outstretched and her head turned to one side with her blonde hair trailing behind her. Her exposed face had been eroded, chewed, clawed and torn away exposing bone and raw muscle. The wounds were old, but blood drizzled into the water as if they were new. It flowed no more than a foot from the wound before dissipating into nothing. The teenager ran adrift on the bank.

  She didn’t have much choice. Other bodies, all marred and in worse condition than the beautiful girl, bubbled up from the center of the pond and floated to the surface. The force of subsequent carcasses pushed the first ones out to the edge of the pool. Soon, they choked the pond. Within moments, it was impossible to see the water under the weight of corpses.

  Keeler tore at his face, trying to clean it of the corpse-polluted water. He ripped off his shirt and scrubbed at his face. But no matter how much he tried, the pond’s touch never left his skin. He forced himself to spit up every last drop of liquid in his throat until he dry heaved. He blew his nose over and over again. He didn’t want any part of the pond on him. He knew what this place was. This was where the bodies were kept. Jeter had never revealed where he’d hidden them, but here they all were, in a soup of lost souls. He threw his shirt down in disgust.

  “Do not fear us.”

  A woman had spoken to Keeler. She stood atop the corpses at the center of the pond. A water-soaked, sheer nightdress clung to her slim figure. She was somewhat older than the blonde who had touched his face, somewhere in her twenties. Although she’d spoken to him, she was quite dead thanks to an ear-to-ear gash across her throat. Keeler had no idea how she had spoken. Her mouth, like the gash in her throat, had been stitched shut.

  This was too much for Keeler. He scrabbled away from the abomination of corpses, his feet struggling to find purchase in the soft soil.

  “Please, don’t run.”

  The sadness in the dead woman’s voice halted Keeler. Her sorrow cut through him like a bitter wind. He no longer feared her and he slowly rose to his feet.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The woman remained unnaturally still, as if suspended by unseen puppet strings with no puppet master at the controls. Pond water dripping from the hem of her nightdress was the only sign of animation. The dead woman’s unblinking gaze and unmoving lips unnerved Keeler. He couldn’t maintain eye contact and he wondered if she noticed. How horrible for her, he thought and forced himself to look at her. Keeler walked as far as the water’s edge, drawn by her ability to communicate, but he made sure he wasn’t within arm’s length of any of the corpses.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “One of Jeter’s victims.”

  Keeler realized she was speaking through the slash in her throat, the words passing through the stitches.

  He felt uncomfortable asking the next question. “When did you die?”

  “In ninety-eight. August sometime, I think. I’m not sure exactly. He kept me locked up for some time before he eventually put me out of my misery.”

  “And you’ve been here ever since?”

  “Yes, I think so. It’s hard to tell. Time has no place here. Days have no beginning or end.”

  While she talked, Keeler tried to recall Jeter’s victims. Her face was no help in death--she resembled none of those murdered. Suddenly, a name shoved its way into his head.

  “Are you Rebecca Morrow?”

  “Yes.” A smile filled her reply. “I am Rebecca Morrow.”

  He smiled back, happy to have brought her a taste of happiness in Jeter’s manufactured hell.

  “It’s good of you to remember.”

  Keeler remembered a lot about her from the news coverage. He remembered the holiday snap most newspapers had shown in their stories--a happy and tanned Rebecca squinting against the Corfu sun. She looked a hell of lot different when a tabloid had run an autopsy headshot after the police found her naked body in Epping Forest. It was that grisly image which had helped Keeler remember.

  “Can you help me?” he asked.

  “If I can.”

  “I’m looking for two other men. Their names are Lefford and Allard. They would have come this way a couple of months back.” Keeler stopped himself, remembering what Rebecca had just said about time having no place here. “Have they come this way?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “Have you spoken to them?”

  “No, but I sense people exist here who shouldn’t.”

  Keeler swallowed hard.

  “I can’t tell you where they are, but I can tell you they are still here.”

  The tone of her voice told him something had happened to them. He wasn’t up to asking what yet.

  “Is there anybody else here,” Keeler indicated to this make-believe world with its sunshine without a sun, “who could possibly tell me where I could find them?”

  “You need not worry about that. Everybody here senses those who should not be here. Have no fear, these men will find you.”

  He did have fears. He feared Rebecca and the lake of corpses she stood on. He feared Lefford and Allard and what had happened to them. Any amount of time spent inside Jeter’s world was bound to distort the mind. He could feel himself changing already, nothing severe, just a low level disturbance at the back of his brain, a whisper telling him what to do. He wondered if it was a permanent change and if it was too late for him already. He wondered how long it would be before O’Keefe sent another inmate after him.

  “What is your name?” Rebecca asked.

  “Keeler.”

  “What’s your first name?”

  “Michael.”

  “You should leave before it’s too late, Michael.”

  Keeler wished he could, but there was no going back--no pardon waiting for him with his name on it. Even if he made it out of this thing alive, O’Keefe wouldn’t let him rejoin general population with what he knew. Whether Rebecca liked it or not, this was Keeler’s new home.

  “I gotta go,” Keeler said, turning to leave. “Thanks for your help.”

  “You can still save him.”

  “What?”

  “The child. You can still save him.”

  Anger flared inside Keeler. The child--how did she know about the bank? Was she reading hi
s mind? He whirled on Rebecca.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he snapped. “What child?”

  “There is a boy here. The police captured Jeter before he could kill him. The police learned of the boy, but never located him.”

  Keeler’s flesh tingled as his rage subsided. Images of Tim Mitchell’s bloody corpse clawed their way into his brain again. He pushed Tim to the back of this mind in favor of this other lost boy.

  “No one else can save him,” Rebecca said.

  “That doesn’t make sense. What do you mean the boy’s in here? How can that be?”

  “Come to me, Michael.”

  He stared at the heap of mutilated bodies she was standing on.

  “They’ll support your weight.”

  “But they are…” Words failed him and he pointed at the knotted victims.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rebecca said with overwhelming compassion. “We feel nothing. You cannot do anything to us that hasn’t already been done.”

  Keeler swallowed. He eyed a decapitated man before him and placed a foot on his barrel chest. The corpse squirmed against its neighbors, but it supported him. His next step connected with the partially flayed face of a middle-aged woman. She grinned up at him as his foot pressed down on her ruined cheek. A wave of shifting flesh spread out from his footfalls. The movement was disconcerting, but there was a rhythm to it and he could combat the ripple effect by waiting a brief moment before taking his next step. With each step, his confidence grew. His strides lengthened and his speed increased. Rebecca encouraged him with words of support.

  When he was halfway to her, he lost his footing after misjudging the ripple and went down with a wet slap. Cold, wet, dead flesh touched his warm, living body. He tried to get to his feet but he kept sliding over more corpses. Out of reflex, he dug his fingers into the cadavers to stop his slide. When he realized where his hands were, he yanked them free. Even when he’d removed his hands, he still felt the sting of death. His fear made his fingertips turn cold and the cold spread, worming its way into his flesh. Death was invading him. Getting to his knees, he rubbed his hands against his clothes to wipe away the death.