Trader rubbed his forehead hard, with the back of his left hand. “‘Course it is, Ryan. I don’t know what happens sometimes. It’s like my brain makes a malfunction connection and the wrong word slips out of my mouth. It’s not that I really think you were O’Mara, you know?”
“Sure. I understand.”
“Anyway, it doesn’t make a spit of difference to what I said. Shut up this two-headed freak or I’ll shut them I mean her permanent.”
Ryan wasn’t in the mood to argue. Edna-Evangelina hadn’t stopped talking and arguing with each other since the moment that they let her out of the cell. He’d hoped that the “failed experiment” might be able to give them information about what the whitecoats planned to do with Krysty, but they were totally ignorant, not even seeming to have much idea of what had really happened to them.
They had, unknowingly, chosen the same routein reversethat Mildred had taken on her ill-fated recce, walking along the little-used side corridor that paralleled the main central passage of the wing.
But the two combatative heads kept up a ceaseless running commentary, taking every opportunity to try to score points off each other.
“Never been down here.”
“I have.”
“I’d like to know how you came down here without me.”
“Easy. It was when I was me and you were you and before we became us.”
Ryan had taken up the point skirmish position, leaving Trader to act as rearguard, covering them against a sudden sneak attack from behind.
The woman limped behind them, occasionally aiming the long Mossberg at doors as they passed them, both making synchronized shooting sounds.
“Bang, you’re dead, whitecoat! Bang, take that whitecoats! Eat lead, whitecoats.”
Ryan turned around, making the two heads shrink from him, the two pairs of eyes blinking anxiously. “Not a sound more,” he hissed. “There’s more whitecoats around us now than there are wasps in a nest. If they hear us, then you’ll go back to the laboratories for lots and lots more experiments. And they’ll try to chill us, as well. Understand?”
“Yes,” was said with a single voice.
Ryan dropped his voice still lower, so that the twin heads leaned toward him to catch what he was saying. “One more single sound and I’ll cut the throat of which of you makes that sound. And the other one’ll have complete, total control.”
The reaction was what he’d expected. The dominant head strained to look at its weaker twin, grinning triumphantly. “It won’t be me who loses, sister.”
“And it won’t be me, either,” retorted the other head. “Count on that.”
“MUST BE CLOSE to the main atrium now,” Trader whispered, as Ryan stopped at an intersection of the corridors. “Been lucky to get this far.”
“Yeah, I know.” Edna-Evangelina waited patiently and silently behind them. “Trouble is, we don’t know where Krysty is. Or where the others are being kept.”
“Probably in our rooms in the other wing,” Trader suggested. “That’d make sense.”
“And Krysty?”
Trader shrugged his shoulders. “More likely to be in this wing, I guess. What we could do with is a whitecoat prisoner. Make ’em talk to us.”
Ryan looked around them, listening. “There’s someone coming,” he said. “Might get us a prisoner real soon.”
“Or get to be a prisoner, partner.” Trader patted him on the shoulder. “Like the good old days, isn’t it?”
There wasn’t time to answer.
Just to their left was a set of double doors. Ryan could hear nothing from behind them so he pushed them boldly open, letting the gaping muzzle of the SIG-Sauer precede him into the room. If there had been anyone in there, and he’d tried to inch the doors open, they would have had plenty of warning.
Trader always used to say that if you were going in, then you went in all the way.
The room was empty. It had a row of basins and faucets along one side, with hooks for clothes on the wall. Other than that it was completely bare. Ryan beckoned the others in, moving quickly to the far end where a wide single door stood half open.
It was an operating theater, fully equipped with tables, lights and several sets of instruments glinting hygienically from racks on the wall.