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  “It’s all we’ve got,” Ryan said. “Let’s go for it.”

  With lights flashing and siren screaming, Vee roared away from the curb.

  “What about the paramedic?” Mildred said to Ryan. “I told him we’d let him go when we were clear.”

  Hanging on to the rear compartment’s ceiling, Ryan glanced back at the man strapped to the gurney. He appeared to be asleep, or maybe he’d fainted from terror. “We don’t want him reporting the wag stolen,” he said. “He stays where he is until we’re done.”

  Ryan turned to look out the windshield. They had made no turns since the last right; the wide road ahead was straight as a string. He couldn’t see the speedometer over Vee’s shoulder, but she was really pouring it on. The desolate urban landscape zipped past in a blur. No trees. No dirt. No people. Just asphalt, concrete and glass. In a way it reminded him of the New York of Deathlands.

  Odd to think of the pinnacle of civilization as bleak and inhuman, but that’s how he saw it. A vast, cold emptiness. But Deathlands was certainly no picnic in the park, either, and this wasn’t his era to judge or condemn. All he knew was he didn’t want his life to end here.

  He turned and looked back at his companions—J.B., Krysty, Doc, Mildred, Jak and Ricky stood or sat, eyes staring at nothing. Each was lost in his or her own thoughts, but he was sure they all felt the same way.

  This was no place to die.

  The few wags ahead of them didn’t stay ahead for long. As Vee bore down on their back bumpers, they immediately slowed and pulled close to the curb, out of her path. He had read about the different-colored lights hanging over the intersections with side streets. Their purpose didn’t seem to apply to the wag they were in. Or Vee just ignored it.

  They’d been rolling for about a mile when the radio crackled with a different voice sounding a new alert, but the message was familiar: station under attack, officers down, all personnel return at once.

  “Good grief!” Vee said. “That’s Midtown North! They’re already hitting it!”

  “How far away?” Ryan asked.

  “We’re on Eighth Avenue,” she said, as if that would mean something to him. “It’s a straight shot to Fifty-Fourth Street and the precinct house. Maybe five minutes if I don’t have to slow down.”

  She didn’t slow down; in fact she sped up. The wag’s engine screamed at redline. It felt as if the tires were barely touching the ground, as if they were floating over the street. Ryan guessed she was doing one hundred miles an hour or damned close to it. At that speed a minor fuckup, a swerve of the steering wheel, a stray dog in the road, a pothole, and they were going to flip and roll, roll and roll, until the wag was a pile of unrecognizable twisted steel wrapped around a thousand pounds of raw human hamburger.

  Over the engine noise, the blasterfire outside got louder and louder—strings of single shots and long bursts of overlapping automatic fire. And there were explosions, too. To Ryan they sounded like the flat whack of detonating grens.

  Vee started to slow down at Fifty-Third, past the tallest buildings he’d ever seen. They stretched up and up, he couldn’t see the tops, and there were too many stories to count—even if he’d been in the mood for counting them. Then she swung a hard left on Fifty-Fourth. Ryan smelled the smoke a second before he saw the blaze. The odor was like burning tires and roasted pork.

  A huge bonfire raged in front of a squat four-story, gray-stone-faced structure with a doorway at either corner of the street-facing side. It was hard to tell, but from the wreckage, it looked as if a police wag in the parking area had been rammed broadside by a big white step van. Both vehicles and the three squad cars parked next to them were fully engulfed in fire.

  When Vee stopped the EMT truck in the middle of the street, everybody bailed from the wag with blasters drawn. Through the side window of one of the crushed cop wags, Ryan could just make out the head-and-shoulder silhouette of a body behind the steering wheel. It had already burned to a blackened crisp. The flames from the fuel tanks had jumped so high that they had ignited the red, white and blue flag on the stanchion at the top of the first-floor facade. The heat was withering. In the leaping firelight, the building looked dirty; the pale stone was streaked with stripes of dark moss or grime.

  As Ryan moved for the closest doorway, longblaster in hand, a deafening sustained burst of autofire came from above. Muzzle-flashes strobe-lit the darkened, second-story windows.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The only light in the limo’s trunk was what leaked through the backs of the taillight housings—a weak red glow that occasionally flared brighter when the driver hit the brakes. Though the floor of the trunk was fully carpeted, it was hardly comfortable. The overloaded limo was riding very low on its suspension. Every time it hit a bump, Dr. James Nudelman bounced in the air and came down with a jarring thud. So did the pile of automatic weapons jammed in beside him. Disoriented by the numerous turns the driver had made, he had no idea where he was, except he was pretty sure they hadn’t left Manhattan.

  The vehicle had made just one stop since his kidnapping. The purple gang had left him bound and gagged in the trunk while they’d attended to another matter. He’d cringed at the first sounds of gunfire from outside; he’d known people had to be dying as a result. The shooting had gone on and on, like the soundtrack for an action movie. When it had finally ended, nothing had happened for the longest time, then the trunk lid had popped open again. In the glow of the courtesy light, a creature had loomed over him with a knobby outstretched hand. It had grabbed him and rolled him to one side. Looking warily over his shoulder, he’d watched as armload after armload of M-16s was dumped on the floor. More and more flat black weapons were piled in, until the heap avalanched, toppling over against his back and head. He had no idea where the guns had been stolen from. Turned to face the wheel well, he couldn’t see out of the trunk. Then the lid had slammed shut and he’d been in darkness again.

  After about ten minutes of driving, the limo turned and suddenly angled up. Then it hit a big bump and there was a sharp scraping sound, as though the undercarriage was dragging on pavement. A moment later the vehicle stopped. The trunk lid reopened and the reptilians began unloading the heap of guns. When they had emptied the compartment, one of them took hold of his ankles and hauled his legs out over the back bumper. Gathered under a massive arm, he found himself being lugged across a ground-floor parking garage. It was hard to focus because his captor held him so loosely—his head kept bouncing up and down, and he couldn’t raise it high enough or long enough to take a good look around. Though he was pressed against the creature’s side, his skin rubbing against its ridged hide, he felt no body heat. Under the thin layer of purple satin, it was as cold as a stone.

  The reptilian carried him to an elevator but didn’t take it. Instead it followed the others through a doorway and down a flight of stairs to a concrete hallway. From the steady hum of generators and the start and stop of pumps, Nudelman assumed it was the building’s environmental-system-and-maintenance level. The air seemed much warmer, probably a result of the heat given off by the machinery.

  Over the drone of equipment, he heard what sounded like people yelling, but the noise was muffled and he couldn’t make out what they were saying. If it was in fact people, they didn’t sound pleased. As he was hauled down the corridor, the volume of the shouting grew steadily louder.

  When the creature who held him stopped and opened a door, a torrent of frantic noise washed over him. They entered a long, windowless, gray concrete room, harshly lit by banks of overhead fluorescents. On either side of the room, the yellers and screamers were housed in individual, widely separated cells with steel bars. There were at least twenty of them. They weren’t cells like in a prison; they were on four wheels, as if they’d been designed for circus animals or use in a medical lab or veterinary clinic. The captives couldn’t stand upright; the best they could do was crouch on all fours, and that put their backs against the inside of the ceiling bars and th
eir heels against the rear wall.

  Almost all of the prisoners wore the white lab coats of physicians, scientists and engineers, which made him think their captors were in the process of collecting a particular breed of homo sapiens, as a dog fancier might do with corgis or standard poodles.

  Even inside the long room, it was difficult for him to understand what the other prisoners were shouting about. The sound of their voices had an odd quality—like an echo or reverb effect. It distorted the separation between words, turned them into unintelligible mush.

  After a few seconds, his brain sorted out the voices and the words crystallized. Some of the prisoners were cursing a blue streak, while others were making angry, empty threats of criminal prosecution and civil action. They weren’t directed at the creature who carried him; the captives were shouting blindly into space—like madmen.

  After being dumped on the floor, Nudelman was untrussed and shoved headfirst into an empty cage. Before he could turn, the barred door clanked shut behind him.

  The shouting continued unabated after the purple monster left the room. It was relentless, and it set Nudelman’s teeth on edge.

  As he glared at the prisoners on the other side of the room, he noticed a blurring of his vision. And in the air between him and them, there seemed to be flurries of tiny glowing sparks. When he tried to focus on these little spots of light, they instantly disappeared.

  Using his knowledge of human anatomy and physiology, he immediately put it down to blood rushing to his head and strain on his retinas from cutting his eyes sideways, trying to see where he was going, while he was being carried. The intermittent noise that he had at first determined to be the sound of pumps starting and stopping seemed to be nothing of the sort. The grinding wasn’t from a motor. It was too loud, too deeply pitched, and it made the floor and walls shiver. The noise seemed connected to the appearance of the strange sparks. In the pulses between grinds, they were absent. He knew that had to be sheer coincidence—the spots and the slight blurring were a function of his brain and his eyes, not the result of some outside phenomenon. The combination of grinding sound, bright spots and blurring made him queasy. Then a darker thought occurred to him: he could have sustained a serious head injury when the pile of assault rifles had fallen on him.

  The man in the cell directly opposite began to beat his balled fists on the barred floor of his cage. He wore blood-spattered hospital scrubs, and his face was cherry red, suffused with fury. He looked vaguely familiar.

  “What the hell is going on?” Nudelman shouted over the din. “Who are these things? What are they going to do with us?”

  The man in the lab coat kept beating on the floor and ignored him.

  “Hey! What is going on here?”

  His fellow prisoner threw back his head and unleashed a blood-curdling scream at the ceiling.

  Nudelman could see the man was losing it. There was no way to tell how long he had been kept hunched over like a pill bug in the little rolling cage. He tried again to communicate, shouting at top volume over the chaos in the room, slowly and distinctly enunciating each word. “Who...are...these...creatures? What...do...they...want?”

  The man in the scrubs looked right at him, but there was no response. It was not only as if he hadn’t spoken, it was as if he didn’t exist.

  Shock, Nudelman told himself. It had to be from the shock of being kidnapped and caged in a madhouse.

  The bars that made up the floor of his cell hurt his knees. He shifted his weight, but there was no way to get comfortable. The cage was designed for a much smaller prisoner, say a golden retriever or chimpanzee.

  He took in the rest of the room. A thick hose was coiled on the wall next to a water tap. In the aisle between the two rows of cages was a metal-grated floor drain. Nudelman found the sight unsettling. He was beginning to feel pressure in his bladder; soon he was going to have to relieve himself. Were they expected to do their business in their cells, like hamsters, have it fall to the floor beneath, and then at some later time, it would be hosed off down the drain?

  Everything that had happened to him so far pointed to a bad outcome.

  Were they being held so they could be experimented on? To what possible end? Or perhaps their bizarre captors intended to slaughter, then eat them. He discarded both ideas almost at once. Any person off the street would fill the bill for experiment and slaughter; the preponderance of lab coats in the room meant they had been specifically selected. Their knowledge and specialized skills had put them in harm’s way. One thing was clear, there was no national government or rational mind behind it.

  As he looked at the prisoner opposite, the grinding noise returned and once more he saw a shower of tiny twinkling lights, like fireflies winking on, then off. As before, he felt as if he was going to throw up. The other man had stopped yelling, perhaps because he was exhausted, but the others took up the slack. His face remained blurred, as did everything else on that side of the room. Again Nudelman got the sense that he knew the man from somewhere. Had he seen him in the hospital? At a medical convention? At a biotech symposium?

  No, that wasn’t it.

  It seemed vitally important to place the fellow. If the two were linked by their past, it could be a way to break through to him. A point of contact might also help explain their current predicament.

  A name popped into his head. Danson. No, that wasn’t it.

  Hansom. No.

  Ransom!

  Oh God, Nudelman thought. It was Dr. William Ransom! Aka “Wild Bill” for his surgical panache and legendary, three-second fuse in the OR. He gripped the bars of his cage and pressed his forehead against them. Ransom was the foremost neuro cutter in Manhattan, ranked number ten in the world. They had met at a three-day wealth seminar in the Bahamas several years ago. Over umbrella drinks at the poolside bar, Ransom had seemed a likely pee-battery-investor prospect. They had exchanged business cards and talked expensive, big-boy toys—private jets and yachts; Ransom had one of each—and politics and economic theory. Nudelman thought they had made a real connection, and with its disfiguring mark, his face was not easily forgotten.

  “Dr. Ransom!” he roared through cupped hands. “Dr. Ransom, it’s me, James Nudelman!”

  Wild Bill stared right at him, but it was as if he was looking at a blank wall. Tears were streaming down his face and his fingers, his precious surgeon’s fingers, were battered from pounding them on the bars.

  “Doctor, are you all right?”

  The world famous surgeon swept the back of a hand over his contorted face, smearing it with blood, tears and snot.

  “Doctor, are you all right?”

  Slowly Ransom’s eyes rolled back in his head until only the whites showed. Then he took a deep breath and started screaming again.

  That set Nudelman’s blood boiling. They were no more than thirty feet apart! Elite surgeons were notoriously self-centered and dismissive of those outside their specialty—or those in the specialty but below their global rank—but he and Ransom knew each other! They had talked at length about the failure of Ross Perot’s presidential campaign in 1996. So what if he wasn’t an MD? So what if he wasn’t a big-time cutter? So what if he hadn’t flown in to the seminar on his own private jet? So what if he didn’t have a three-hundred-foot yacht to sail home in? They had history!

  Suddenly the most important thing in the world was to get Ransom to acknowledge the fact that he was alive and a prisoner in the same room. Nudelman waited for a lull in the yelling match with the grinding, then bellowed as loud as he could, “Ransom you fucking asshole, answer me!”

  The words cut through the layered din like a cannon shot.

  Then the din swallowed them up.

  Across the aisle, the world-famous surgeon stared at Nudelman as if he didn’t exist.

  * * *

  THE WORLD-FAMOUS SURGEON, a man who could restore life and function to the disabled, who could reanimate the seemingly dead, who routinely held the very seat of the soul in the latex
-gloved palm of his hand, crouched on all fours and screamed. He screamed until he was on the verge of blacking out from oxygen deprivation. The inarticulate, strangled cry echoed in the long concrete room. The walls were lined on either side with rolling cages just like his.

  Waiting empty cages.

  Over the span of a half hour of confinement and isolation, he had gone from shouting “Help me!” to just roaring as loud as he could. His throat hurt from the sustained effort. At this rate he knew he would soon lose his voice altogether.

  Why didn’t someone answer him?

  He had guessed from the trek down to the windowless room that he was in the bowels of a Manhattan high-rise office building or condominium. There were usually video cameras in such places. If not, there had to be security guards or maintenance men. Someone had to pass by the metal door.

  At least in theory.

  The empty cages stared back at him. There were dozens of them. Why so many? he thought. Who else were they—the horrid creatures who had kidnapped him—going to put in them?

  “Someone help me!” he croaked.

  Ransom regularly paid a large number of people big money to do just that. And not just to help—to serve his every whim. He paid annual salaries with bonuses and benefits to the flight crew of his Gulfstream jet, the captain and crew of his Feadship yacht and the full-time staffs at his medical offices and mansions around the world.

  Where were they all now, when he really needed them?

  The memory of Mr. Carstairs’s brains splattering the team around the OR table came back in a ghastly Technicolor rush. No doubt about it, he had fallen into the hands of murderers. Whoever, whatever his captors were, he knew if he did not obey he would meet the same or a worse fate than his poor patient. The littlest monster had promised him as much.

  Under different circumstances, Ransom would have liked to examine that strange creature more closely and at length. As a scientist and physician, he found the Frankenstein-esque interface between living flesh and nonliving components both fascinating and remarkable. Such a thing had been thought impossible outside B movies and comic books: metal and muscle crudely joined to create functional movement and a reasonable semblance of life. How had the contraption been assembled and where? Had someone actually designed it, or had it just been cobbled together as needed out of spare parts? Was there a real human brain squatted inside that half-metal skull?