Frankenstorm

Book 0: Frankenstorm

by Ray Garton

Genres: Horror; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

"Remember when paperback originals were cool? Sex, action, suspense? Try FRANKENSTORM. It's old school." —Stephen King A storm of epic proportions is brewing off the coast of northern California. Residents have been warned to prepare for disaster. It's a false hope in the face of what's coming. . . Frankenstorm In a secret government lab, virologist Fara McManus tries to stop an experiment out of control—before more human subjects are infected. But in a blazing hail of bullets, survivalist Ollie Monk launches a paramilitary attack on the lab, releasing the infected into the night. And as the nightmare escalates to a fever pitch, internet blogger Ivan Renner traces the destruction as it claims more victims, beginning with a single mother unknowingly spreading the virus. A father and son, held hostage by a lunatic. A local sheriff, single-handedly fighting madness, murder, and worse. No one will find shelter from this storm. Praise For Ray Garton "Gripping, original, and sly."—Dean Koontz on Live Girls "Garton will scare you."— Fangoria Includes Ray Garton's bonus story "The Guy Down the Street"

Release date: May 26, 2014

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 417

Sample

“It’s starting to rain. You two need a ride someplace?”

Will looked with suspicion at the young Latino smiling from the open window of the van’s passenger door. A grinning cartoon man held up a wrench on the side of the van beneath the words MINUTEMAN PLUMBING. There was a phone number below that, and then, 24 HR. SERVICE! The van had pulled up to the curb next to them just seconds ago.

He didn’t like being suspicious of people when they tried to do good things, but Will knew it was stupid not to be, at least a little. As much he wanted to think that people were basically good and decent, he knew there’d been a rash of disappearances lately among Eureka’s homeless population and from what he’d heard, the police weren’t all that interested in doing anything about it.

“We’re heading across town,” the man in the van said. He was young and had a pleasant, smiling face.

Will looked down at Margaret. She was in pain, though she’d never say a word about it. He looked at the man in the van again. He didn’t set off any of Will’s alarms.

“We’re going to Halvorsen Park,” Will said.

“Oh, yeah, just up the road. Slide that door open and hop in.”

Will stepped over to the van and opened the door for Margaret.

Fifteen minutes earlier, Will left the Old Town Shelter with Margaret and they headed along the sidewalk with stomachs full of beans, cornbread, and hot coffee. He had a backpack and Margaret carried a large, bulging, cloth bag that made her list to the left.

“Cornbread was awful dry,” Margaret said. Her voice was hoarse.

“You think so?”

She nodded. “But it was awful good.”

They’d managed to sneak out before the sermon. He didn’t know Margaret well, but he remembered that her attitude toward that stuff matched his.

The cloudy, late-October day was ending and growing shadows darkened 2nd Street in Eureka’s Old Town. The Carson Mansion loomed over the shops even though it stood a couple of blocks away. It was an enormous Victorian mansion that towered over everything like some fairy-tale house from a faraway land, as if it had dropped out of the sky and plopped itself in the grubby surroundings of Eureka, California. But Will knew it had been built by a pioneering lumber baron for his wife, a gift of beautiful excess, a work of art, but most important, a safe and warm home for a family, the kind of home many people no doubt dreamed of when they thought of coming to America. Even when it was still a home, it also served as a monument for what could be achieved in America with enough determination and hard work. But now it was owned by a private club for rich men who held meetings and social events there. The club preserved the mansion and kept it looking as beautiful as it had the day it was finished. A monument, no longer a home. The public was not allowed on the premises.

Will didn’t know where they were going, but he didn’t ask because he didn’t even know if they’d be sticking together. All he knew was that they were walking together now, as they had a couple of months ago. He hadn’t seen Margaret since then because he’d been hanging around McKinleyville and Arcata, traveling on foot, sometimes hitchhiking, catching a bus if he had a little money. New laws were making it harder to stay in one place for very long. He had to keep moving.

He was thirty-one-years old and had been on the street for one year and five months. It felt like a lot longer. He’d been homeless before, but never for such a long stretch. Each time he looked in the mirror of some public restroom or homeless shelter, he found his reflection more unfamiliar. Older and hairier, thinner and more weathered. His once sensitive but pensive eyes—“The eyes of a worried little boy,” Kim used to say—had filled with a cloying desperation that he found difficult to look at for long. He knew the day was coming when he would not recognize the face that looked back at him, when all traces of himself finally would be gone.

He’d met Kim at AA. He’d been attending for months when she showed up looking lost and frightened. She remained silent through two meetings, and at the end of the second, he introduced himself and offered to buy her coffee. After thirty minutes in a Burger King, he had her laughing. They spent that night together and were married a month later. Will worried that they’d been too impulsive, a common problem among addicts. But the next four years proved it hadn’t been a mistake. Both of them had come from troubled, abusive backgrounds and long ago had severed family ties to go it alone in the world. They saw in each other the anchor their lives had been missing.

They barely scraped by, of course. He was a high school dropout, and neither of them had any marketable skills. But they managed. He got hired to work the loading dock at a trucking company, a position in which he’d flourished. Kim did a lot of waitressing before lucking into a steady job at a rental car company. For the length of their time together, they remained sober. They focused their energies on each other, drew strength from each other. Then Will lost his job, and Kim got sick.

She didn’t seem sick at first, she simply started to lose weight. They thought it was a good thing, because she was a little overweight, something that had started when she stopped drinking. But the weight loss progressed rapidly and it soon became apparent that it was not a good thing. Abdominal pain followed. She went to a doctor, he ordered some tests, and she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It all happened quickly, and the next thing Will knew, the anchor he’d found in Kim was gone and he was alone again.

He tried to find work, but with no success. In their four years together, he and Kim had lived from paycheck to paycheck and had been able to save very little. Will soon had to leave the apartment he’d shared with Kim because he couldn’t pay the rent. He stayed with a friend for a while as he looked for work, but he found none.

Now he was homeless, penniless, and futureless, walking through the dusky shadows with a fellow homeless woman almost twice his age.

“What have you been up to, Margaret?” he said as they walked. She’d aged in the months since he’d seen her. She looked wearier and was limping slightly.

She shrugged her bony shoulders. “Tryin’ to stay outta jail. Tryin’ to keep from starvin’. The usual. Where you been? Ain’t seen you in a few months.”

As they walked, Will told her about his wanderings.

Before Will had left Eureka, he and Margaret had spent a good deal of time together. They felt comfortable with each other. Instead of the camaraderie one might expect to exist between homeless people, there was a great deal of distrust. Being alone on the street instilled a feeling of vulnerability that never went away. But Will and Margaret had connected quickly. He knew nothing about her because she’d offered no information, and Will hadn’t talked about his own background much, either. The companionship was enough.

“It’s gonna rain tonight,” Margaret said. “I can feel it in my bad hip.”

“Too late to get beds for the night. Where do you want to go?”

She shrugged again. “I know a spot in Halvorsen Park.” She held out her hand, palm up, as it began to sprinkle. “Gonna get wet no matter what, looks like.” She reached into her bag and removed a compact umbrella which she extended and opened. “Ain’t you got an umbrella?”

“Used to. I sold it to an old guy in Arcata who needed it more than I did.”

“What’d you get?”

“Couple of candy bars and a pretty nice flashlight.”

Will was taller by more than a foot, so she lifted the umbrella high enough to cover both of them.

“Storm’s a-comin’,” she said.

“You think?”

“Oh, yeah. A bad one.”

“What are the cops up to around here these days?” Will said. “I thought they cracked down on Halvorsen Park.”

“They did for a while. It’s calmed down now. I know a spot.”

“Is your hip up to the walk?”

She waved a bony hand and said, “My hip can live with it.”

But Will could see that her limp had worsened since they’d left the shelter.

As they walked down 2nd to I Street, it quickly grew darker and the sprinkle turned into a modest downpour.

Traffic had been thin, with only an occasional car passing by in either direction, so Will noticed the sound of a vehicle slowing down as it approached them from behind.

That was when the white van with the cartoon man on the side pulled up next to them.

As Margaret got in, Will took off his backpack, then he got in and hugged it to his lap. He closed the door and the van pulled away from the curb.

There was a cardboard box at the other end of the seat, so they were a bit cramped. Will looked over his shoulder at a black drape that separated the backseat from the rear of the van.

The man at the wheel was older than the passenger. Heavyset, balding, brown hair speckled with grey. He looked at Will in the rearview and his eyes smiled.

“I hope you got a dry place to stay,” the passenger said, “’cause it’s really starting to come down.”

“I know a spot,” Margaret muttered.

When the driver made a U-turn on I Street instead of turning onto Waterfront Drive to go to the park, Will knew something was wrong.

He started to lean forward and say something when Margaret began to struggle and kick beside him. Before he could turn to see what was wrong, a hand holding a white cloth filled his field of vision. The cloth was pressed to his face and his nose filled with a harsh chemical odor.

Everything melted away into blackness.

“They’re calling it Frankenstorm,” the boisterous male voice on the radio said, “because it’s just damned spooky. A hurricane like this on the West Coast? Get outta here. But it’s happenin’, folks, it’s happenin’ in the morning. Climate change is really kickin’ our butts! It’s created a freak set of meteorological circumstances, and the result is Hurricane Quentin, which will be dancin’ our way tomorrow morning, Saturday, to the tune of two hundred mile-per-hour winds, which means you’d better tie your butt down or kiss it good-bye. I’m not joking, kids, you’ve got to be prepared for this. Have plenty of candles ready because we’re gonna lose power. Have water and nonperishable foods on hand, and for crying out loud, stay indoors. I’m ready! I’ve got my baby-duck swim ring on and the Classic Rock 97 studio is loaded with Red Bull and Doritos, so bring it on, baby! Here’s The Doors singing about what we’re all gonna be in the next twenty-four hours, ‘Riders on the Storm.’”

Dr. Fara McManus had stopped chewing her fingernails in college, but now she couldn’t find a nail to chew on because she’d gnawed them all away. Wind raged outside and driving rain rattled against the single window in her office in what used to be the Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital. Today, the office felt smaller than usual.

Fara sat at her desk, but with her chair turned around so she could look out the window. She sat with her right ankle resting on her left knee, right foot bobbing nervously. Her insides were knotted with dread. It wasn’t a new feeling. She’d been feeling that dread long before Hurricane Quentin was announced. She’d started feeling it by the end of her first week working for Corcoran. The storm only made it worse. The grey world outside her window was blurred by the windblown rain that dribbled down the glass.

Why isn’t this window boarded up yet? she wondered.

It would be if someone responsible were in charge.

A knock at her door made her jump. She swiveled the chair around as Dr. Jeremy Corcoran pushed the door open and leaned into her office.

He was a tall, lanky man in his late sixties, balding on top with a wild explosion of long, frizzy, silver hair all the way around his head, a matching goatee, and thick horn-rimmed glasses. His nose was narrow and prominent and his mouth looked too small for his face. In the white lab coat he always wore, Fara thought he looked like a mad scientist from an old movie.

He is a mad scientist.

Corcoran was the reason she had taken the job. He was also the reason she desperately wanted out of it.

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything, Fara,” he said with that little chuckle that seemed to punctuate everything he said.

Fara said nothing, just waited for him to go on.

“I’m having a little gathering in my quarters this evening.” Chuckle. “Nothing special, just some drinks, some music. I thought we’d have a little party to greet the storm.” Chuckle. “Like I said before, I think it’s a good idea if everyone stays here for the duration. So I thought a little party would help everyone relax.” Chuckle.

“A party?” she said. “Is that a good idea?”

“Well . . . I don’t think it’s a bad idea.”

She stood. “Dr. Corcoran, I don’t know if liquor is wise when we’re about to get hit by a—”

“Please,” he said, still smiling as he closed his eyes in frustration for a moment. “Jeremy. I wish you’d call me Jeremy. I’ve told you, after all this time, I don’t see why you insist on being so formal when—”

“And as I have told you, Dr. Corcoran, I think we could use a little more formality around here. This is not just a storm we’re talking about, it’s a hurricane, and I’m not sure we’re prepared for it. Getting drunk doesn’t strike me as a very good idea right now when we’re about to—”

He cleared his throat loudly to interrupt her and said, “Look.” His fists clenched at his sides for a moment, but quickly relaxed.

Corcoran hated confrontation. And she was pretty sure he was eager to get back to enjoying his high. Pills, she suspected, but nothing would surprise her. She could tell because his pupils were dilated and his eyes were wide instead of his lids being at half-mast as usual, and he seemed hyperalert.

“I know you have some problems with the way I’ve been running this project,” he said, “but let’s keep one thing in mind. I’m still in charge. I know you’ve reported me more than once and yet, in spite of that, I’m still in charge. That should tell you something, Fara. Vendon Labs put me here to do a job and, apparently, they like the way I’m doing it. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’re here because of your government connections, Dr. Corcoran. This is a government project and they want you on it because of your past work in—”

“You are free to leave, Fara. I would hate to see you go because I think you’ve been an asset, you do very good work, and I appreciate your contributions to the project. But no one is holding a gun to your head.” Chuckle. “Personally, I hope you’ll stay. But if you do, then I suggest you . . . relax a little. Please come to the party this evening. Socialize. You’ve been here all this time and nobody knows you. Everyone suspects there’s an interesting person behind that stiff, professional demeanor, but nobody’s seen her yet. Quit being such a”—chuckle—“a stick in the mud. All work and no play, as they say.”

Before she could say anything more, Corcoran turned and started out, then stopped in the doorway and looked over his shoulder at her.

“Remember, testing soon. See you downstairs in a while.”

That feeling of dread inside Fara threatened to become nausea as she lowered herself back into the chair.

Wind rumbled and rain spattered against the window as shrubbery just outside was violently whipped about. It was as dark as dusk at a few minutes after two in the afternoon.

She reached down into her purse by her feet and removed a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke loudly. Another bad habit she’d resumed since coming to Springmeier.

Fara had been recommended for the job by Dr. Delia Urbanski, one of her former professors at Stanford. It did not sound appealing at first—in fact, she had to stifle a mocking laugh when Professor Urbanski described the project to her—but it came along at a time when she was looking for any escape.

After finally ending a long, bad relationship in Tucson, where she’d had a tedious job at a small pharmaceutical company, Fara moved back home to northern California and got a job in San Francisco as a hospital microbiologist specializing in infectious diseases. She knew that, in that position, she would be spending more time with patients than in the lab and she thought it might be good for her to do something outside her comfort zone. She enjoyed the work itself and, for a while, thought she’d made the right choice.

It crept up on her. She was able to dismiss it at first, tell herself it was simply part of the landscape, an unavoidable consequence of providing health care to the masses. Looking back on it, she realized she’d pushed the subject out of her mind often the first eight or nine months, not wanting to acknowledge it to herself so she wouldn’t have to deal with it. But it crept up on her.

The patients were powerless numbered assignments given to nurses and staff. They were poked, prodded, and drugged by people who saw them as nothing more than work. Day after day, Fara heard the nurses talk about their patients as if they were lab rats or something growing in a petri dish. Week after week, she saw people who existed as nothing more than numbers with diseases.

Fara recognized that this was a ridiculous way of looking at a hospital—how else were nurses supposed to deal with so many patients? Most hospitals were understaffed and most nurses were overloaded with work, but even when that wasn’t the case, this was how hospitals worked. She understood that. To think otherwise was unrealistic and maudlin, but there it was, in her head, persisting. Underneath it was the fear that she would come to do the same thing.

All of that was made even worse by the thing that Fara knew dominated and virtually ran every hospital—politics, which did not even take the patients into consideration. From the inside, everything felt so cold, impersonal, and businesslike. And ultimately, that’s what it was, what it had to be. It was, after all, a business.

But those thoughts persisted, and before she knew it, they had become feelings and she had slipped into a depression that clutched at her quietly, trying to drag her down and hold her back.

When Dr. Urbanski called, Fara was thrilled to have an alternative. It was the kind of job she never thought she would consider taking, but Dr. Urbanski’s arguments were compelling.

“This would be fantastic experience for you, Fara. It would look good on your CV, you would learn a great deal, and how many opportunities do you think you’ll get to work with Corcoran?”

“I thought you said Corcoran was crazy.”

“I did, and he is. Most people would call him eccentric because of his notoriety, but I know him, and I say crazy. He’s a bundle of quirks, and that was fifteen years ago. By now, he’s probably bouncing off the walls. But most brilliant people aren’t wired like everybody else. Look at you.”

“Me?”

“Drop the false modesty, Fara. You’re a brilliant woman, one of my best students, and if you had some ambition to go with your intelligence, you’d be rich by now. Think about it. How well do you fit in with average people? Do they see you as . . . odd? Does casual conversation with them come easily to you? How did you get along with people at the last, say, wedding shower or baby shower you went to?”

“Well, I . . . I’ve never been to either.”

“See? I rest my case. You know what I’m talking about. Jeremy Corcoran is a brilliant man, a genius, great leaps ahead of everyone else in his field. But he’s crazy. An utter loon. An emotional mess. Frankly, I’m not sure he has emotions. He has a great mind, but it’s in the possession of a man whose emotional and psychological development froze somewhere in late middle school. And to maintain access to the great mind, everyone puts up with the spoiled, self-obsessed, hedonistic asshole.”

Fara knew the type, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to work for one.

“Look, Fara, you’d be crazy to turn this down. The connections you’ll make alone will be worth it. One job like this can lead to other government work, and that’s always a good thing. If you want it, I think I can get it for you. I know a couple of people. But you need to decide soon. And you need to say yes.”

Fara was still thinking about Dr. Urbanski when she left her office half an hour later. She turned left and headed down the corridor as Emilio, one of the janitors, wheeled a bucket into a utility closet, mop in hand. He was soft-spoken, a tall, heavy, black man in his mid-thirties with short-cropped hair.

“Hello, Dr. McManus,” he said, smiling.

“Hi, Emilio.”

“While I’m down here, you want me to do your office?”

“Yes, go ahead. I’ll be out for a while. I’ve got some work to do.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“No, I’m doing some work down in the . . . well, with Dr. Corcoran. Go ahead and do the office, Emilio. And thanks.”

Her shoes clicked on the tiles as she walked past him and reverberated in the broad, otherwise empty corridor.

Fara knew she should have thought about the job longer when Dr. Urbanski told her about it. She should have asked more questions. Once she knew what the project entailed, she should have asked for certain assurances. But she did none of those things.

And now, she was in the former Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital, making her way down to the basement, where she would engage—and not for the first time—in performing deadly experiments on human subjects against their will.

Most of what Fara was doing there would never show up on her CV. Not even if she survived.

The closing music of Ivan Renner’s Internet radio show began to play. It was “Tangerine Dream,” a cut from the Miracle Mile soundtrack album.

“That’s it for another Friday edition of Red Pill Radio,” he said. “This weekend, everybody here in the Redwood Empire will be hunkering down for the big storm that’s set to hit the West Coast tomorrow morning. Normally, we don’t get full-blown hurricanes here on the West Coast. We get tropical storms, what’s left of the hurricanes, because the water’s too warm and the current runs in the wrong direction. Or something like that, I’m not a meteorologist. But climate change is doing some weird things to our weather and the storm coming in is a good example of that. A lot of people are wondering, though, if HAARP is being used to disrupt our weather. Is it possible it’s being used to control us by controlling our weather? We’ll be doing a show about HAARP next week. And we’ll have a guest who’s written a new book about the US government’s history of experimenting on citizens without their knowledge or consent, too, so keep tuning in. If you missed a show, you’ll find it in the archives at our website, Red Pill Radio dot com. Until Monday, stay safe and be calm, because we’re all in this together.”

He wrapped up the show in the small room he used as a studio. It was in what used to be his garage; six years ago, he’d added onto it and converted it, in part, into the small room where he sat for three hours, five days a week, and broadcast to the world via the Internet. The show’s audience had grown rapidly in recent years. Ivan was getting more requests for interviews in publications and on other shows with each passing month, and a New York publisher had shown interest in the book he was writing.

The door opened and his assistant Mike Dodge stepped into the studio as Ivan stood and stretched his arms above his head.

“Ollie just called and he’s not happy,” Mike said.

“When is Ollie ever happy about anything?”

“He says he’s coming in to speak with you.”

Ivan sighed with more than a little dread. He stepped around Mike and stood in the doorway. The small room, which had a table with Ivan’s laptop and a couple of microphones and was only big enough for him and a guest, should he have one, began to feel a bit cramped by the end of the show. “Remind me, Mike—after this storm’s over, I need to have a window put in here so it’s not so claustrophobic.”

“You know, you can do the show from your office if you’d just—”

“I know, I know. I just like the idea of having a separate place for the show, you know? A studio. Even though this isn’t a real studio. But it’s the closest I’ll ever get to my boyhood fantasy of being a radio DJ.” Ivan stepped out of the studio and through the small alcove that opened on a room full of desks. Julie was on the phone, Rudy was busy typing at his keyboard, and the other desk was unoccupied and piled with books and papers. “Ollie didn’t say what he wants?”

“No, but he sounds more upset than usual.” Mike looked and sounded nervous. That always happened when Ollie showed up. Mike was gay, and Ollie, who was loud and often obnoxious and never hesitated to loudly criticize things he did not approve of, made him jumpy.

“Great. Probably something about the hospital. Ever since I mentioned a possible connection to those missing homeless people, that’s all he ever wants to talk about. I don’t know what he expects from me. Send him in when he gets here.” Ivan went into his office and closed the door.

It was more of a walk-in closet than an office. A desk, two chairs, and a single file cabinet left room for no more than two people, three if comfort wasn’t a priority. But unlike the studio, it had a window behind the desk that looked out on Ivan’s backyard. It was dark out there and the pyracantha bush outside his window was being whipped around by the wind. The weather was bad, but it wasn’t anything too unusual. He knew the storm that would hit in the morning would be a lot worse, and he still needed to get the windows boarded up. Ivan seated himself at his desk with a sigh and mentally prepared himself for a visit from Ollie.

Ollie Monk was something of a local celebrity. He was loud, opinionated, sometimes paranoid, and he’d been kicked out of more than one City Council meeting for angrily disrupting the proceedings. He was a regular listener to Red Pill Radio and often called in to make bombastic comments or argue with guests. He wore a lot of camo and drove around in a black F-150 with two rifles on racks in the back window.

Ivan knew little of Ollie’s background other than the fact that he was a veteran of the first Gulf War and he’d inherited a handsome sum from the uncle and aunt who’d raised him. His aunt had invented some kind of powdered adhesive for fabrics—or something like that, I. . .