A War of Shadows

FIFTEEN

The four-year-old mentality of Sandy O’Connell, fortified by the addition of a teddy bear called Mr. Jinks, fell into the routine very easily. The floor she was on was devoted almost entirely to cases such as hers; people who were hot and needed to be put on ice for a while, and were expediently regressed. The drug-induced hypnosis was useful in many ways; those under it could also be persuaded for fairly long periods to see others differently. All in all, there were fourteen “children,” nine males and five females, in the wing. Their average age was forty-four.

This technique allowed a close but relaxed watch on all of their activities. Like most drug-induced things, there were no certainties here, and the human biochemistry differed from individual to individual, making dosages tricky and occasioning a few times when reality began to peer through at inopportune moments. For the most part, though, they saw themselves and each other as children, and they laughed together and cried together and played together. The one drawback to regression was the necessity of keeping their section on the ground floor, since they needed to be outdoors regularly. A playground had been established, and a fence built to prevent wandering, but from the playground could be seen rolling hills and thick green trees, and not too far away a small stream on the other side of which passed a road down which occasional trucks and official cars passed.

There were no ordinary patients at Martha’s Lake Veterans Hospital, as the place was called. There had been, once, before the emergency, but not now. Many of the people there were there without a lot of medical hypnosis; they were there because wives, children, others they were close to were hostage to their willing self-commitments. They, on the other hand, had no reason to believe that this venerable government sanitarium did not contain some real patients, and the impression that it did was reinforced by the staff. The old fellow who insisted that he was Secretary of the Army under Millard might well have been—but he might also have thought he was Napoleon last week. And who remembers the name, let alone the looks, of even current, let alone former, Secretaries of the Army?

So, too, it was unsettling to see the childish adults in the yard over there beyond the fence. Whether they were truly retarded or insane, or whether they were made that way, was not for the others to say. If the latter, those poor people were a reminder of what could happen to those who made trouble or got out of line.

But the drug only made you think you were four; these regressed adults were still in possession of their reasoning faculties under it all, although filtered through their delusion. That fact was becoming an interesting and unforeseen reality to the warders, who found themselves the victims of devilishly sophisticated childish jokes and games, and also caused still greater problems.

Hospitals were fun, Sandy O’Connell thought, but she missed her Mommy and Daddy and her big brother and sister. The longer things went on, the more she thought of them and the more she missed them. They hadn’t come to visit her once, and she was beginning to fear that they had abandoned her here, didn’t want or love her any more.

It was an oversight for the strained technicians at Martha’s Lake; a parental visit could have been easily programmed in. They were simply too busy and too pressed to think of everything.

Finally, Sandy started to stare at the green fields and trees and road beyond the fences. Down that road, maybe, was home, her home and her friends, and her Mommy and Daddy. Maybe they couldn’t come to see her, maybe the doctors wouldn’t let them.

She decided to go to them.

It became one more game, but this time with a purpose. She snuck around, Mr. Jinks in tow, watching how the attendants in their white jackets walked and worked, how closely they watched everybody and how sloppy they sometimes were.

She also found that where the big, tall fence met the brick side of the building, there was a narrow gap. The fence hadn’t been put in with a prison in mind; it was part of the original establishment, and the fence post was prevented by its design and mooring from being too close to the building. Even so, there were roughly twenty centimeters between wall and fence. A terribly tight squeeze, but very inviting to the four-year-old child who discovered it.

Like most children’s plots, though, this one was only partly thought out and not deeply considered. The idea was simply there, and when the opportunity came along it was available.

That opportunity came when a big fellow named Mike suggested hide-and-seek with the seekers to be the warders. The other “children” thought it a tremendous joke for all of them to hide in and around the ward and make the hospital people find them.

There was only one of the white-coated attendants watching them, half-heartedly, his bored mind on a lot of other things than this.

And now it was on. With a yell from Mike a bunch of them started running for the door where the attendant sat, leaning back on the rear legs of a folding chair. They caught him completely by surprise, deliberately bowling him over as they rushed to their hiding places.

He yelled, picked himself up, and ran through the entryway after them, screaming bloody murder. He ran right past Sandy O’Connell, not very well hidden behind some large metal cabinets stuck in the hall just inside the door. When he swept past and she saw she wasn’t discovered, she crept outside, looking for a new and better hiding place. Her eyes went to the fence and that telltale opening she’d discovered but shared with no one except Mr. Jinks. She headed for it, made it, and started trying to squeeze through.

For a while it was tough going; the jagged ends of the fence snared her flimsy hospital gown, which tore when she pulled the material away, and it hurt and scratched when she pressed on. She began to be afraid now, began to be afraid first that the attendant would come and see her and her secret would be lost, afraid, too, that she wasn’t going to make it, that she was going to be stuck between the fence and wall forever. She started to cry and tears welled up,but she kept at it, and suddenly, with a ripping sound, she was through and falling on her side, rolling down a grassy meadow.

She stopped at the bottom and lay still for a minute. A lot of little cuts stung, and she was still afraid, looking back up at the fence. There was no one in sight.

Finally she picked herself up and ran off toward the trees. Once there, she picked a big tree near the edge of the glade and looked back, fearfully. She could see the whole playground now, and still there was no one.

Now, suddenly, a couple of white-clad adult figures emerged and stalked around, looking over the sliding board and other kid’s apparatus. Satisfied that none of the “children” were hiding there, they took one last glance around and went back inside. Sandy O’Connell pressed back into the recesses of the tree as the men seemed to look her way, but when she peeked out again they were gone.

She turned and walked deeper into the forest, toward the small but fast-flowing stream she could hear, still clutching her teddy bear and suddenly preoccupied with other things a four-year-old would find fascinating on a warm summer day: flittering butterflies, pretty flowers, and a babbling brook.

The brook itself looked inviting, and she managed to get her sneakers off and wade in. The water was real cold, and she got out fast. The sneakers wouldn’t slip back on, though, and she didn’t know how to untie the laces to get them on, so she left them. The adult Sandra O’Connell would have followed the nearby road; the four-year-old Sandy followed the pretty if cold brook.

The chief of security was furious. “Crofton! Damn it! How could you have let this happen?”

Crofton, the attendant bowled over by his charges, looked sheepish.

“Jeez, boss, I was just sittin’ there, lookin’ at ’em, you know, when all of a sudden, pow! They all give a big yell and charge right at me! Hell, I didn’t know what was goin’ on until they hit me full and spilled me! Even so, it was only one of their kid’s games, you know, nothin’ serious.”

The security man stared at Crofton hard. “You have them all back in their rooms now?” he asked softly.

Crofton looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“Well, no, not exactly. A couple got all the way past the ward desk and out into the lobby. They were hell gettin’ back, let me tell you. We got all but one now, though. Looks like she managed to lose herself in the shuffle and got into the main hospital, but it’s only a matter of time, you know. After all, she’s only four in the head, you know.”

“Name?”

“O’Connell,” the attendant replied. “Nice-lookin’ broad, you know? A little older than I like ’em, but—”

“Can the evaluation,” snapped the security man impatiently. “You sure she’s still in the hospital? No chance of a breakout?”

“You know the exits are all guarded, and there’s the main gate, too. She didn’t get through there, so she must’ve got into the other wings.”

The security chief was dubious. “Show me where you lost her,” he ordered, getting up from behind his desk.

Eight attendants were still searching the “Children’s Wing” and many more the rest of the hospital when the chief of security and the hapless Crofton walked down the hall from his office to the exit to the playground.

All his life John Braden, now the security head, had played hunches. He was in a powerful position here, and he meant to keep it. Things had gone sour many times in his thirty-two-year government career, but never irrevocably so. He was good, and he knew it. Mistakes couldn’t be avoided in any situation; the trick was in making sure they didn’t get you.

The playground seemed innocuous enough. The fence itself was ten feet high, double-braided chain-link, not something you could easily climb. At the top were sharp barbs at the termination of every strand.

His eyes followed the fence all the way around, until it came back nine or more meters away to meet the brick side of the building. From any angle except almost on top of the juncture, it didn’t appear there was an opening.

Still, there was something that caught his eye, something that felt wrong. He walked down to where the fence met the building, Crofton following silently.

Braden spotted it almost immediately. Shards of light blue cloth were caught on the edges of the fence, and the ground dug up in the area of the opening.

“Jeez! You mean she got through there?” Crofton gasped. “But—that’s so small! She ain’t no big woman, but she’s got enough up front to—”

“Nevertheless, that’s what she did,” his boss said. “Back when I was with the federal prison system we had a guy over eighty-two kilos get out through a vent shaft less than three-quarters of a meter square.” He picked at the torn remnants of cloth.

“Let’s get going,” he told the attendant. “I want to see the outside here. You notify Region Security Command that we’ve had a break, then get Dr. Ahalsi to run a check on every one of the patients in the kiddie ward. I want to know if this was a planned break or not. I want Region to know if they’re dealing with a retard or a fully functioning adult.”

Crofton hesitated. “Jeez! Either way, she must be dirty and bruised and half-naked, with no money or nothin’. She sure shouldn’t be hard to spot and pick up.

“Get going, Pollyanna, before I commit you to this place!” Braden snapped acidly.

Crofton got going.

Following the water, Sandra O’Connell came to Lake Martha—not a big lake, but a nice, pretty blue one used by a number of people for trout fishing. It being mid-week, though, there was no one around when she got there.

She stood there for a moment just staring at the picture postcard scene, the girl-woman entranced by this new place. After a moment she went down to the lake, testing the water first this time to see if it was warm. It felt cool, but not cold, and she waded in a little, sat down in the water, splashed around and had a good time although Mr. Jinks got as wet as she did.

Soaked and sloppy, she started walking around the lake, just a meter or two from the shore. Her more adult common sense seemed subconsciously to keep her from walking out into the deep center.

A thousand meters or so brought her to a partially submerged boat-house. The double doors were locked, but by going under the part that was angled just out of the water she found a number of missing boards. It was an old place, neither used nor fixed up in a decade or more.

Feeling suddenly very tired, she crawled into the boathouse from underneath and pulled herself wearily onto a fairly flat dry section smelling of oils and paints. It didn’t matter to her; she was sleepy and it was a nice place to stretch out just for a few minutes.

Just a few minutes…

“Mitoricine,” the psychiatrist told Braden, “is a funny drug. I’ve never liked our using it, and its effects and aftereffects are extremely unpredictable. Enough constants are there, though, to tell me that I would not like to be on the stuff myself, ever.”

Braden nodded. “Tell me, when is her dose going to wear off?”

The medical man looked at a chart and shrugged. “Hard to say. She was due for it today at two, and repeated early doses at a larger rate were administered, so the last shot, to be on the safe side—this stuff can kill you or turn you into a vegetable if you blow it—was a low to medium dose. Assuming vigorous exercise, which will aggravate the drug condition, she should just about pass out within a couple of hours, maybe sooner, maybe later—it varies with the individual. She’ll sleep a good long time, the body fighting the remnants of the drug, then wake up uncomfortable and lethargic. It’ll take a long time to get her back to normal, and it’ll come gradually.”

“So you mean she’ll still be a retard?” the security man asked eagerly.

The psychiatrist shook his head. “Not in that sense. Reaction time will be down, things will be foggy, like that. She’ll be jumbled, confused, have some trouble behaving normally. It’s much like an adverse reaction to pentathol, only much longer.”

“So she’ll still be no problem to catch,” Braden said hopefully.

The other man shrugged. “Who knows? All I can tell you is that she might have a hell of a time convincing anybody she was a doctor.”

Military men and State Policemen combed the area with bloodhounds. They quickly followed her to the stream, found the abandoned sneakers, and picked up the trail. They were all convinced that they were after a severely retarded woman, and that intensified their search.

Within minutes they made the lake, and were stopped dead. A complete circle of the lake was made with the hounds, but there were no signs of Sandra O’Connell coming out of that lake. More than once they passed the old, broken-down boathouse, but it was obviously padlocked and there were no signs of any sort of forced entry. Once or twice one of the searchers would duck under and shine a light around, but saw nothing.

They decided then to drag the lake, and it took time for the local fire department’s rescue equipment to arrive. It was past six in the evening before they started dragging; the sun went down a little over two hours later, and they were forced to call it off for the night.

They had found two badly decomposed bodies in there, a lot of junk, and an entire automobile the New York State Police had been looking for as a getaway vehicle for over three years.

They didn’t find Sandra O’Connell, and patrols that ringed the lake farther out found no sign, either. They concluded that she had to be in the lake when they knocked off for the evening. They felt sorry that they hadn’t found her, but weren’t in much of a rush any longer.

During this entire period, Sandra O’Connell slept in a drug-induced comatose state inside the boathouse, unmoving and barely breathing.

They were all gone by ten; most had been out in the field for many hours, through suppertime and beyond. They left their equipment and went home. An all-points bulletin was issued for her, however, on the off chance that she had indeed escaped. Phony name, of course. But they weren’t finished with her, no, not finished.

Braden needed a body to preserve his own neck.