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.
Electronic key in the cup holder.
Engine roar.
Still no Nihilim.
We departed the flying saucer and rolled down the ramp as if motoring through a bizarre dream. The only proof of the sun was a thin line of blood-red light in the west. The moon hadn’t yet risen.
The wicker man towered into the night, as did the steel T. rex. The eye-in-the-mouth-in-the-ear heard-said-saw. The Aztec temple offered a stone altar saturated with blood that would eventually be of interest to the gatherers of forensic evidence at the FBI.
We drove single file across the crater, if it was a crater, up the long-eroded wall, and down the slope to where we had left the Mercury Mountaineer that we had acquired in the Republic of Beebs the previous night.
From there, Keiko and another Special would drive the first two Mercedes Sprinters. Mo Gong and his crew would follow in Sprinters three and four. They would head north on State Route 85, then east on Interstate 10, all the way to Phoenix, which was about a two-and-a-half-hour trip. Once in the city, they would not risk taking their complaint to authorities, because virtually any police agency would be seeded with operatives from the federal Internal Security Agency. Conceivably, the ISA might be well aware that sympathetic patrons of theirs—government officials, media executives, titans of industry—had been to the Oasis to engage in atrocities. They might want to protect their own and deny Bodie Emmerich’s victims the opportunity to name names. Therefore, the four Sprinters would be driven to the home of Mr. Hector Luis Salcidero—my former boss, the publisher of Arizona! magazine—with a handwritten note from me. Hector was a good guy, one of the best. He had contacts. He would lead the accusers to one of the city’s TV stations and get them breaking-news airtime to blow open the story in such a big way that it couldn’t thereafter be squelched.