The Waking Moon

Chapter Thirty Seven

With the gun poised against my shoulder, I stepped into the hall of the fourth floor. This one wasn’t lined with doors like a hospital or a simple hotel. It had hardwood floors with oriental runners, and the walls were papered in shiny gold. To the right, all I could see was a small door with a grated window that was probably a utility closet. I headed left, holding the gun out in front of me, my finger twitching on the trigger.

There were only two doors on the entire floor. They each had a fancy handle instead of the more functional knobs in the rooms downstairs. It looked like the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel. I tried the handle, but it was locked. Securing the rifle’s safety and holding the stock in both hands, I raised the gun over my head and brought it down as hard as I could against the handle. The metal dented and pulled away from the wood. I struck it again. This time, the knob split away and fell to the ground.

Holding the rifle close, I threw my body against the door. It banged open. Inside was a huge room with doors leading to other rooms. In the corner was a fully stocked wet bar lined with bottles of whiskey, bourbon, and cognac. There were stylish sand colored sofas and reading chairs, a brown lacquered coffee table, and a large plasma television mounted on the wall. Expensive looking vases filled with fresh-cut flowers had been placed around the room, along with baskets of fruit and bowls of chocolate. In the farthest corner was a workstation with a computer, a printer, and a series of shelves piled with books. A man sat very still at the desk, staring into space.

“Hello?” I called, but the man didn’t turn around.

I approached him carefully, making a wide circle until I could almost see his face. He was a heavy-lidded man with dark skin, short, thinning hair, and a gray-speckled beard. He looked to be in his early fifties. The computer screen before him was black, and yet he stared into it as if deep in thought.

“Hey,” I said.

The man sighed and shifted his tired gaze to take me in. He looked as though there were nothing on earth left to surprise him. But when he saw the sweat-drenched, rifle-wielding teenage girl before him, his eyes crinkled in confusion. “And what, may I ask, are you?”

“Tell me your name,” I said from behind the gun.

“Dr. Saval Patel,” he said, exasperated. “What do you want?”

“What are you doing here?”

He took off his reading glasses and looked more closely at me. “Do you mean, am I part of the hapless cult of the terminally ill who, at some point next January, will lie down with their strychnine cocktails, and await the lunar equivalent of the Hale-Bopp Comet?” He slipped the glasses into the breast pocket of his shirt and leaned back in his chair. “I am a prisoner here. Along with two of my colleagues. We are being employed against our will. I would normally express joy at the sight of a gun, which might suggest that we are saved, but I can’t help noticing that you are a child.”

“Dr. Patel,” I muttered. I lowered the rifle. “You’re the biotech guy.”

“Yes,” he said dryly. “The biotech guy.” He got up from the desk and moved to one of the reading chairs, where he lowered himself gingerly onto the cushions as if he were nursing unseen wounds. “And you are…?”

“I’m looking for my friend Rhodes. Juliana took him away this morning…”

“The boy!” Dr. Patel exclaimed. “It’s unconscionable, bringing a child, however brilliant, into this bizarre…”

“Where is he?”

Dr. Patel nodded at a door across the room. “Still resting. The succubus wore him out, as expected. Though he seems to be recovering faster than the rest of us did.”