The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [34]
“Get out, now!” The male voice was tinged with hysteria.
Laurel slammed both hands on the enclosure door and jumped outside, to collide with a bewildered-looking Lukas and Raul. Floyd Carpenter was showing a different face from the man who had greeted them at the sewer entrance. Gone was the calm demeanor, replaced by panic.
“Your implants are broadcasting!” he yelled.
She reached to the lump in her neck. “Broadcasting? What are you talking about?”
“Come with me, fast.” He turned on his heel in a whirl of lab whites.
Raul jerked his head toward Lukas. “You know anything about that?”
The little man darted a drizzle of nervous glances between Laurel and Raul. “I-I swear, I had no idea—”
“Well, you do now.” Raul dashed to a pile of towels on a metal rack, grabbed one, threw another to Laurel, then bolted out the door, leaving a trail of wet footprints and water drops in his wake.
Twenty yards down an impersonal corridor, they piled through a set of double doors into a surgery room crammed with equipment, screens, and blinking lights.
“Look!” Floyd pointed to a large screen where, superimposed on a heartbeat track, another complex line spiked and fell in a fast sequence. “These implants are emitting high-frequency signals.”
Laurel narrowed her eyes. Someone with enough insight must have demanded that the designers include a transmitter. It made sense. The cunning addition gave Hypnos an ace up their sleeve. A card they had kept secret, even from Congress and the committee that approved the hardware. Damn! She stared at the trace on the screen, her mind churning with the implications. Another detail we didn’t know. How many more are we yet to discover?
“Do you have X-ray machines here?” she asked.
“Well, yes, but—”
“Then get an apron.”
Floyd opened his mouth a couple of times like a floundering fish. Then his eyes froze as the penny dropped. In two strides, he hurtled through the doors, his footsteps echoing down the corridor.
“I swear—” Lukas started.
“Don’t waste your breath.” Raul slapped Lukas between the shoulder blades. The small man winced as his towel dropped off. “Hypnos has probably been discreet about whatever extras they have packed in their sensors.”
Even from the government, Laurel thought. The air was thick with bactericides and the penetrating smell of lanolin wafting from Russo’s body. “I wonder what else they forgot to publicize.”
Laurel stepped over to a gleaming table. Under the harsh light of an overhead LAD array, Russo’s emaciated and unnaturally pale body—bare of hair or nails—resembled a cross between a model of a giant fetus in its early stages of development and the larvae of a stick insect. She gaped, aghast, at the wasted shape. His pruned skin, with an unnatural sheen, twitched at intervals as if subject to electric shocks. Laurel neared the head of the table and reached to pry open one of Russo’s eyelids. In slow motion, his pupil contracted. She glanced at the steady rhythm of his heartbeat on the screen. So far, so good. A peppering of wireless pads dotted his chest and head, while two lines snaked from IV ports in his hands to unlabeled bottles dangling from a frame. From his penis, a catheter drew whitish fluid into a transparent bag. She spotted tiny perfusion marks on Russo’s neck and several discarded ultrasonic syrettes on a rectangular tray atop a wheeled cart. Dr. Carpenter had probably been working to stabilize Russo and scrub the sedatives from his blood.
A series of sharp beeps issued from a bank of automatic analyzers.
She scanned the printout scrolling from the printer. “Holy—”
“That man has not had his blood scrubbed in ages. No maintenance, nothing. Nobody told me. He needs a total transfusion.” Floyd stood just beyond the swinging doors, a buff sheet folded in his hand. “Right now he’s a toxic dump. His blood is laced with complex chemicals and heavy metals.”
Laurel nodded. Another detail they hadn’t known. According to Shepherd, Russo would be unconscious and weak but not a living corpse.
“Total transfusion? More like a new