Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) Read online

  The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person, situation or corporate entity is purely coincidental.

  Copyright© 2013 All Rights Reserved.

  Ann Marie’s Asylum

  Volume One: Master and Apprentice

  by Christopher Rankin

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: The Asylum Corporation

  Chapter 2: Doctor Death

  Chapter 3: Lost Pets

  Chapter 4: The Drowning Tank

  Chapter 5: The Camel Spider

  Chapter 6: The Baby DeathStalkers

  Chapter 7: Ivy, The Beautiful

  Chapter 8: GirlFixer

  Chapter 9: Asexual

  Chapter 10: The Pink Pelican by the Sea

  Chapter 11: The Shadow People

  Chapter 12: Ivy, The Lost

  Chapter 13: Datura

  Chapter 14: The Red Formula

  Chapter 15: Hydrofluoric

  Chapter 16: SpiderWebFace

  Chapter 17: Abandon

  Chapter 18: The Spokesman for the Nightmare

  Chapter 19: The Red Storm

  Chapter 1

  The Asylum Corporation

  A yellow taxi cab wound the foggy road along the cliff. Ann Marie was riding in the back when she noticed something strange in the palm trees by the side of the road. At first, the thing resembled a voodoo mask. It floated across the fog like a soap bubble in a soft breeze.

  The strange face hovered alongside and kept pace with the taxi. She got closer to the cab window to get a better look. As the thing floated closer to her, its eyes came to menacing life.

  Stunned at the sight, she murmured something that got the cab driver’s attention.

  “You OK, kid?” the driver asked as he checked on her in the rearview mirror. He quickly brought his eyes back to the road because the fog was especially severe.

  Ann Marie could see what had to be a little boy’s head floating in the mist. Somehow the child’s body was concealed and only the eery features of his face could penetrate the fog.

  The boy’s cheeks, mouth, forehead and even his lips were covered in strange tattoos. The bizarre ink markings were changing shape, flashing and morphing into various images and icons. She saw branching fractal shapes, Greek and Latin symbols and even Egyptian hieroglyphics. Then suddenly, the ink pattern on the boy’s face crumbled into tiny fragments. These bits then recombined into dozens of miniature forbidding faces.

  Each set of tiny black eyes stared right across the fog at Ann Marie. Then smaller faces sprung up inside of these. Shrinking ever smaller, more drawn faces nested inside one another, until the little boy’s skin was teeming with chaotic black lines. His head looked like a cloud of black locusts.

  A break in the fog revealed that the boy’s entire body was somehow levitating. Below him, a huddled group of perhaps six teenagers in black, hooded robes seemed to be praying to him. The next moment, the flying boy and the rest of the group were swallowed back into the fog.

  Ann Marie questioned the cab driver. “What the hell was that? Did you just see that?” She searched the fog behind the cab for the apparition but it was gone.

  “I’m just trying to keep the car on the road and keep us from going over the cliff,” he said to her. “How could you see anything in all this soup?”

  “I know I saw something.”

  “Well, what was it, kid?”

  Ann Marie considered for a moment how she might describe the painted, floating head. She decided that the topic was best left alone, especially on her first day of work. Her heart was still fluttering in her chest and she took a moment to answer the cabbie. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s early. I’m not used to getting up early. I must have been dozing off and dreamed it.”

  “You work at that weird weapons plant up on the hill?” asked the driver, changing the subject. “What are they hiring kids for?”

  “I’m a scientist, actually,” she said, with a hint of attitude. “And it’s not a weapons plant. It’s a research center.” She added, “It’s my first day.”

  “Research, huh,” answered the driver with a note of skepticism. “If that’s what you want to call it. You seem pretty young to be a scientist.” He took a quick peek away from the road to look her over from the rearview mirror. It made Ann Marie uncomfortable and she slid her bag and laboratory notebook over her lap.

  The taxi driver was a bone-skinny man with overwhelming dark eyebrows shaped like perfect commas. The rest of his hair looked like a bad brown dye job. He turned on the air conditioner to defog the windshield, telling her, “I’ve never been on this road before. Been driving in LA for thirty-six years. Been looking up at that weird Asylum building for over twenty of them, since it’s been standing. Never had any idea what went on there. I’ve heard things, of course, but I suppose it’s all just rumors because the place is so secret. I bet you’ve got to be one of those super kid geniuses to get a job in that place.”

  “I’m just a chemist,” said Ann Marie. She was still trying to find some sign of the tattooed boy in the fog. “Hey, do you think I should report seeing something when we get to the security gate? It looked like something weird was going on back there.”

  “What do you mean weird?”

  “It looked like a little boy,” she said, “floating up in the air. There were other people around him too. Wearing robes.”

  The driver laughed at her, saying, “Suit yourself, kid. If it were my first day on the job, I wouldn’t open with that story. You were probably just dreaming.”

  “Probably,” she said, ending the conversation.

  When the taxi arrived at the main guard booth near the top of the hill, the fog wasn’t quite so thick. The Asylum Laboratory started to take shape in the hazy morning. The steel and concrete structure looked less like a modern industrial laboratory and more like a stainless steel beehive.

  The guard at the booth had a bushy, ivory mustache and looked like a lawman from the old west. He even wore a blue felt-lined cowboy hat that matched his modern uniform with the corporate logo. The name on his lapel read: Sheriff, Asylum Corporation.

  Before Ann Marie could announce herself, he already knew who she was. “Good morning, Doctor Bandini,” he said in a deep, rough voice. “I understand it’s your first day of work. We’re very happy to have you at the Asylum.” He tipped his hat and told the cab driver it was as far as he could go. To her, he said, “I’ll take you from here, doctor.”

  For her first day on the job, she was wearing a secondhand grey skirt suit. Her mother had spotted it for her in an old thrift shop while they were driving through Nevada. They were short on cash and Ann Marie needed something presentable.

  The grey polyester was older than she was and fit her body awkwardly. She had to constantly tug on the skirt to keep it from riding up. Her brown hair had been brushed in nervous strokes that morning to a near perfect sheet. Ann Marie’s coffee-colored eyes were surrounded by a generous amount of black eyeliner. It was the only kind of makeup she practically ever wore. The drawn wing tips gave her eyes a distinctly feline quality. She still had a nervous blush on her cheeks from the sight of the tattooed face a few minutes earlier.

  As the Sheriff walked her up the path toward the laboratory, he told her, “Ya know, you probably get this all the time, but you look awful young for a chief chemist.”

  Ann Marie smiled, saying, “I’m seventeen in a month.”

  “Is that why you had to take a taxi on your first day?”

  “I’m too young to drive the rental car and my mom doesn’t want to wake up this early.”
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  “My goodness,” the Sheriff said. “Top job in the corporation and you can’t even drive a car by yourself. Pretty remarkable if you ask me. The only time I’ve ever heard of a kid your age with a job like yours was years ago with your new boss, Dr. Dade. I mean, Dr. Harkenrider. Excuse me.”

  “How well do you know him?”

  The Sheriff thought of something and a smile started on his face. “Well,” he said, “I’ve been with the Asylum for a while. Since it was first built. Dade and I go way back. As a matter of fact, he was even younger than you when I first met him.”

  At that moment, Ann Marie peered her head up to take in the entire Asylum building. It was the oddest piece of architecture she had ever seen. The ten-story, perfect beehive contained almost no windows, except for those at the very top, where a large sun deck spun three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. Someone up there could see all the way from the Pacific to Downtown LA.The building’s odd shape and strange rosy silver shine seemed fetched from a far away planet.

  She asked the Sheriff, “Who designed this thing?”

  “That would be first director of the Asylum,” he said. “Doctor Bernard Mengel.”

  “It’s certainly an original.”

  “That it is,” said the Sheriff. “This lab is the crown jewel of the corporation. All the most profitable work comes right out of here. Because this place is so successful, the rest of the company pretty much leaves Dade alone. And,” The Sheriff started to say somewhat gravely, “because it’s so successful, we have our share of security concerns.”

  “On my way in today,” Ann Marie started to say before hesitating, “on the private road, I thought I saw...”

  He stopped walking and gave Ann Marie his full attention. “It’s OK, honey. What’d you see?” He sounded concerned, as though he already had something dangerous in mind. The Sheriff could tell that Ann Marie was reticent. “If you saw something,” he told her, “then it’s a security issue and it needs to be dealt with.”

  “I think I was just tired and dreamed it. I’m not really sure I saw anything.”

  “Then what are you not sure you saw?”

  “A small boy. Maybe five or six. He was floating.”

  “What do you mean by floating?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not sure. It was hard to see in all the fog.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “His face was tattooed.”

  The Sheriff looked uneasy. The fact that the boy’s face was tattooed seemed to mean something to him. “I see,” he said. Then he reached for the radio on his belt. He spoke quietly into the speaker, saying, “We’ve got a sighting just off the private road. Send out a team.”

  The fact that he was taking her so seriously made Ann Marie nervous. “Is everything OK?” she asked him.

  “Of course,” he said. “This place contains top secret stuff. So we can’t be too careful. The boss is very cautious about that sort of thing. Some people say he’s a bit paranoid.” He started to reflect on something that made him turn a shade paler. His eyes scanned the trees and tropical landscape around the building. He added, “Personally, Dr. Bandini, I think he’s got the right idea.”

  At that point, they had made it across the garden and were standing in front of the main door of the Asylum building. “This is where I leave you,” the Sheriff told her. “I’ve been instructed that, since you’re a minor, we are required to comply with California child labor laws. This means you work eight hours or less per day. You are the only minor in the facility. In fact, you’re the only minor in the whole corporation of over ten thousand employees. This is actually a first for me. So, Dr. Bandini, even if you are in the middle of the most important discovery in the history of mankind, when eight hours is up, you put down the chemistry set. That means you take a break, read a book, watch TV or go home. Do whatever you want as long as you aren’t doing it for the corporation.” He added, “Enjoy it while it lasts, kid. I’m gonna have to be on my way because there is a pressing matter I need to attend to. One more thing. Don’t listen to everything you hear about the boss. He ain’t that scary.” He tipped his hat and started back to the guard booth.

  The doors, huge ten foot slabs of frosted glass, started to slide open. When Ann Marie stepped inside, she didn’t find what she had expected. Instead of a large lobby space, which would be typical of a corporate building, she found a long, narrow hallway. Green lights lit up the floor and made the shape of a green arrow pointing forward. A computerized female voice said, “Welcome to the Asylum Laboratory, Dr. Bandini. Please follow the green arrows until you’ve reached your destination.”

  As she walked, the corridor around her lit up and made humming noises. It occurred to her that she was being scanned. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling dimmed. A dozen red laser beams moved across her face. Slits opened in the floor underneath her feet and gusts of pressurized air tossed her hair into a mess. She figured this was to detect undesirable chemical and biological agents.

  When she reached the end of the hallway, two blast-proof doors slid open to the main corridor on the first floor. She continued to follow the green arrows, passing a number of smaller labs with transparent walls that allowed her to see the work inside. At first, she was struck by all the activity around her. Then she realized that she was still completely alone.

  All the work was being performed by robots. Mechanical and pneumatic arms spun around the rooms like hands around a craps table. The rooms themselves seemed entirely alive but there appeared to be no human beings anywhere.

  The green arrow pointed to one of the rooms. The lights were even off inside. Ann Marie noticed the sign on the door: Dr. Ann Marie Bandini, Ph.D. Biological Nanotechnology.

  When she walked inside, she detected that perfectly sterile smell of a cleanroom that she had grown to love over her years in graduate school. She had also gotten used to sharing a second-rate academic lab with six other graduate students. The prospect of having her very own nearly made her jump up and down. Ann Marie looked at the lab the way newlyweds look at the empty living room of their first new house.

  In the corner, she had her very own nuclear magnetic resonance machine. It was still bubble-wrapped and ready for its first measurement. Before this job, she had grown accustomed to sharing a secondhand model, which had been donated to the university after ten years of service. Everything in her new space was state-of-the-art. Someone had gone out of their way to make sure Ann Marie had more than she needed to start her career.

  She heard someone say, “Welcome to the Asylum,” and realized there was a man at the door. A friendly looking Asian man in his seventies or perhaps eighties with a big smile walked in and offered her his hand. He had fancy-looking gold glasses with thick lenses. His pristine white lab coat had a tag that read: Dr. Lin Hoo.

  She immediately recognized the name from her chemistry courses. “You’re Doctor Lin Hoo, the inventor of the Hoo Reaction. I studied your work as an undergraduate. There is a whole chapter on your method in my organic synthesis book.”

  The old man smiled wider and laughed. “Oh yes,” he said, “that was me in my previous life.”

  “What do you mean by previous life?”

  “Before I met Dr. Harkenrider.”

  His answer seemed odd to Ann Marie. “To tell you the truth,” she told him, “I was under the impression you were dead.” She carefully added, “And I don’t think I’m the only one.”

  Lin Hoo slowly nodded as though she had just reminded him of something unfortunate. “You are certainly not the only one,” he said. “It seems that my work has become so secret that I have effectively disappeared from planet Earth.”

  “You know,” Ann Marie said as though starting a delicate topic, “you are the first person I’ve met in here. Well, I guess second. I met the Sheriff this morning too. I guess I just expected to see more scientists, more engineers, more crew, you know, more people.”

  “
Dr. Harkenrider likes to keep the number in here as small as possible. Skeleton crew. I was surprised when I heard we were hiring a new scientist and not building another robot. I don’t see him often but Dr. Harkenrider found me and told me personally that you were coming.”

  “That’s nice to hear.”

  “Your work is so impressive, especially for someone so young.”

  Even though she had been praised in exactly that way countless times, Ann Marie did her best to take the compliment graciously. “Thank you very much,” she said. “Your work definitely inspired me.”

  “It can get a little quiet in this place,” Hoo said. “Sometimes even a little spooky. If you get bored or you need anything, my laboratory is just one floor above you.” He started to walk away.

  “Great,” said Ann Marie. “Thanks.” She stopped him, saying, “Wait a second. Just one more thing. I haven’t met the boss, Dr. Harkenrider, yet. I figured he would introduce himself to me at some point today.”

  Lin Hoo started laughing. “Oh no no,” he said. “I doubt you’ll be seeing very much of him. He keeps to himself in his lab upstairs. If he needs something, he will send someone.”

  “That’s kind of weird.”

  Dr. Hoo started to laugh with even greater intensity. “Weird,” he said as though the word itself was a joke. He started down the hall again.

  For the rest of the day, Ann Marie was all alone with her music and headphones. She toured most of the building’s floors while electronic bass and synthesizers pumped into her ears. She didn’t run into a single other person. However, the laboratory was not devoid of activity. Behind almost every door, factory robots assembled the surveillance and attack drones that kept the Asylum Corporation in business. Sparks flew as automated welding arms did the work that would have belonged to dozens of men.

  At exactly five o’clock, Ann Marie grabbed her bag and left the lab for the day. On her way out of the building, the place seemed even emptier than it had that morning. The pristine, well-lit hallways echoed nothing but machine hums and the throbbing from the various industrial pumps. It struck her how safe she felt without any human voices around.