Quicksilver(90)

“Hey, Doc,” Bridget called out as she moved boldly toward him. “I have this, like, thing in my hand that I don’t know what it is. Kind of scares me, you know, so can you, like, take a look at it?”

We weren’t dressed in the loungewear that Emmerich required of the soul children. The eminent visitors who came to strip off their sophistication and wallow for a while would be better dressed than we were, diamonded and Rolexed, Louis Vuittoned and Guccied. In our plebian ready-mades, we bewildered him. Like a goat in season, he gaped at Bridget after merely glancing at me. He was so certain that the Oasis remained an impenetrable refuge from all laws and social norms that he didn’t suspect his situation until Bridget pulled the pistol from her purse and I showed him mine.

I didn’t realize what I was going to say until I said it. Then the question seemed inevitable, considering his exalted position in this sinister pocket universe. “The Special Selection called Camilla—how did she die?”

“Oh, shit.”

“Did you treat her?”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Did you try to save her?”

“Listen, I couldn’t.”

“How did she die?” I asked again. It was less a question than a demand this time.

His eyes were the green of patinated copper. With the fingers of his right hand, he worked the shiny instruments at the end of the stethoscope as if they were prayer beads—the bell chest piece, the flat diaphragm chest piece, the corrugated diaphragm chest piece—beseeching the patron saint of corrupt physicians.

“Annie Piper,” I said. “That was her real name. How did she die? Tell me now.”

From his perspective, the corridor must have gotten very dark, because his pupils were open wide. “The guy lost control. He beat her badly. She was . . . a mess.”

“Who? Who did it?”

“I don’t know.”

I raised the Glock, let him look into that black Cyclopean eye.

He was shaking. “I really don’t know. Some visitors are famous, their faces, but many I don’t recognize. You wouldn’t, either.”

“What did you do with her?” I said, by which I meant to ask what had happened to her body.

His answer was that of a makeshift doctor, a médecin Tant Pis, who was no more guided by the Hippocratic oath than by the advice of a horoscope. “We had to put her down.”

Bridget gasped, and only at her reaction did the physician seem to realize how callous his reply had been.

I said, “Then she was alive when you saw her?”

“Hardly.”

“You didn’t even try to save her? You put her down like a dog with terminal cancer?”

“Listen, believe me, you have to cut me some slack. I didn’t want to do it. Emmerich made the decision. Talk to Emmerich. He made the decision. She was a mess. She would have been crippled, horribly scarred, maybe brain damaged. He said she wasn’t usable anymore, she had nothing to contribute. Listen, all right, Emmerich is one sick sonofabitch, but he is who he is. He’s got the power, and people who have the power get what they want. It’s how the world works, that’s the way. She was a mess, in agony. We don’t have the facilities here to treat someone in her condition. Listen, listen, I couldn’t let her suffer. I had to put . . . I had to end her suffering.”

“Let me return the favor,” I said, and shot him in the head.

The gunfire alarmed the occupants of the room out of which the doctor had stepped moments earlier. A carillon of anxious voices rang out in English and what might have been Korean.

I stepped around the dead physician, being careful about where I put my feet. He was a mess.

When Bridget and I entered the room where the twelve sleepers had been tethered to their oxygen tanks, the voices fell silent as one. The slab beds had been cleaned. The twelve had all showered. Instead of white sleepwear, they wore shapeless gray uniforms and gray caps, as though the human resources director of the Oasis had been inspired by that champion of workers, Chairman Mao, who had also interred millions of them. Twenty-four eyes fixed on our faces, then on our guns. Bridget pursed her weapon, and I holstered mine even though that allowed my shirt to obstruct it.

“Who speaks English?” I asked.

Twelve hands shot up, and one man stepped forward. “I am Mo Gong. We were brought here as skilled workers, but we have been treated like slaves.”

“Understood. We’re getting out of here. Come with us.”

“Our collars,” Mo Gong worried. “The pain nearly kills.”

“We’ll be out of range of the remotes that deliver the shocks before they try to use them. The collars can be taken off elsewhere. Let’s go now. Quickly.”

The elevator returned from the garage. As night settled on every town from Peptoe to Ajo to Flagstaff, eighty-seven cultists began to imitate life in the floors below. We dared not make two trips. Fourteen of us packed into the cab. We rode up to the garage in the silence of disbelief.

The big garage door stood open. The Specials had boarded two of the Mercedes Sprinter Cruisers. Panthea was behind the wheel of one vehicle. Sparky was in the driver’s seat of the other, with Winston riding shotgun sans shotgun.

Bridget took command of the third Sprinter, and I settled in the fourth, and the gray-togged workers divided among the two.