He could tell what day it was, in spite of the fact that they wouldn’t allow him to have a calendar in his room and his television viewing was strictly supervised in order to edit out any mention of the date. Even the nightly news programs were piped into his room on delayed tape which began after the opening credits and ended before the sign-off, with any reference to the month or day of the week between the two erased.
They wanted the upcoming test to be completely objective, with no possibility of psychological triggering or other mental interference to mar the outcome.
He guessed that he was but one of the survivors of Cummings’ attacks to be kept in the dark about the date to act as a true control group during a study of the phenomenon. This presupposed, of course, that the others who had managed to live through that night of hell were also being observed in carefully-supervised cliques. There would be at least two other groups: one set whose members were being informed of the exact date and passage of time, and another being fed a date that was a day or so off of the true schedule. Extreme? Paranoid? Maybe, but not too much so for the good old U.S.A. government, that he knew.
In spite of the elaborate precautions being taken on his behalf (and he smiled at his own jest), he knew that tonight was the Night; he could tell by the slightly altered actions of the people who had visited his room throughout the day.
Cummings had done a damned thorough job on him physically, so savage and vicious that he had lost his left hand to the surgeon’s knife the same night of the assault and he was still confined to bed a month later. The doctors tried to act normally while they examined him all that day, but their glances at him and fleeting expressions of rising concern when he supposedly was unable to see their faces were dead giveaways, pardon the pun. And Connie, the good-looking nurse who was built like a Greek goddess, had seemed near tears during the one visit she had made.
It had to be January 13.
The orderlies came for him at five p.m. (they did allow him to have a clock in the room, though whether or not it was correct was a fit subject for pointless debate, since it had become the time that he lived by in a biological sense). Dr. Boyce was with them, which also was no surprise, since Boyce had been the accompanying physician on the seven other times that they had gone through the ritual.
“Sorry to disturb your rest, Nick,” Boyce said, repeating the litany. “The luck of the draw says that tonight is another evening to be spent in your vacation suite.”
“In the tank again,” Grundel sighed. The two gorillas began to move his yet-painful body from the comfortable bed to the wheelchair, with their ludicrous concept of gentle handling. “What do I get for dinner tonight, Leo?”
“S.O.S.,” replied Boyce, no longer upset by the use of a diminutive that he had once detested from his patient.
Grundel held back a yelp of pain with his teeth as he settled into the torturous wheeled conveyance. “Give me a break, Doc. You should use your own money to provide me with a royal feast every time you shoehorn me out of my bed and into the loonie room.”
Boyce was still somewhat embarrassed by Nick’s title for the small, reinforced, padded room. “You shouldn’t call it that, Nick. You’re not a mental patient here, and the observation chamber is used solely for your own protection.”
“Yeah, you’re right, I guess,” the young man answered. “I’m not your garden variety psychotic. More of a literal lunatic, eh?” When none of the men made an attempt to counter that assessment, Grundel slapped his right palm on the arm of the wheelchair like a man urging on a taxi. “Let’s get under way, boys; night could fall any minute now, and where would that leave us?”
The ward containing the cells that Nick called “the tanks” was located several floors below his private room and thus isolated from the rest of the facility (in the remote chance of an accident). He had been through the routine of riding the elevator into the depths of the earth a number of times, as the authorities (federal agents of some nameless organization) attempted to keep him off-balance.
The first time that he had spent the night in one of the tiny, escape-proof rooms, Grundel had realized that it was too soon for the time of the Change to have arrived, but he had been uncertain in the trips thereafter; he even hoped that he had already passed the 13th safely, but he had no doubts about tonight being the real test. He was taken in the elevator by an odd sort of mental disassociation, as if he were merely a disembodied spirit observing the developing drama rather than the main character.
Once down in that long corridor of identical cell doors, Grundel saw at least ten other poor souls being wheeled into similar holding rooms and waved jauntily to the nameless faces, his partners in this eerie ritual. How many of them would metamorphosize into clawing, spitting duplicates of Gerald Cummings when midnight arrived?
The hospital personnel were scrupulously casual in their voices and actions while installing him in the regulation bed and attaching various monitoring devices about his body. The room was no larger than ten by twelve, and its entire complement of furniture consisted of the bed; the walls and door were constructed of a reinforced steel alloy calculated to withstand the assaults of a dozen creatures of the strength that Gerald Cummings had displayed, and a number of observation camera lenses dotted the high ceiling. The audio system was set up for continuous reception, so if Grundel felt the need for room service or recognized an approaching bowel movement that could not be taken care of with the available bedpan, he only had to shout his desires into the condenser microphone on the wall.
“That should suffice for now, gentlemen,” he said airily after the changeover into the bed had been completed. “If I need your service further, I’ll ring the bell. Off, away with you!”
Boyce paused at the door with a synthetic smile. “Sorry to put you through this grind again, Nick, but you know the bureaucracy and its mentality.”
“Or lack of it,” Nick added. Boyce managed to produce a chuckle about as realistic as the smile. “See you in the morning, Doc.”
By six-thirty, he hadn’t displayed any dangerous symptoms of feral regression, so a dinner was brought into him by more orderlies. Boyce had been right, he decided after finishing the meal. S.O.S.
Somehow, the signals got crossed, leaving Douglas Morgan on an elevator with another Institute survivor and no hospital flunkies to censor their conversation. Morgan, whose ankle had been badly fractured in his last meeting with Cummings in the long hallway, had been taken in his wheelchair aboard the elevator car, where the second patient already waited with his obligatory pair of muscular attendants. Before the doors could shut, however, the floor was filled with the noises of a man for whom the month of confinement had been too much, driving him over the edge into psychosis. Three of the four orderlies had rushed from the car to help subdue the screaming man, leaving the fourth, a sort of tentative fellow who had not been at the Institute for very long, alone with the two patients.
Morgan listened to the struggle for an appropriate amount of time before cinematically cocking an ear in the direction of the conflict and saying to the last orderly, “I believe they’re calling you.” As he had expected, the nervous man rushed to join his associates and left the pair of civilians alone on the elevator. Morgan rolled his chair forward enough to reach the control panel and set them on a downward journey.
“What in hell’s name are you doing?” demanded the other patient, a heavy-set man with dark eyes and hair.
“Just trying to wrangle some information,” Doug replied.
“We can’t escape this place.”
“I don’t even know where this place is, so I’m not trying to escape. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
The other man looked puzzled. “They’re taking us down to the holding rooms where everybody else will be safe from us if we change into werewolves. Haven’t you ever been down there?”
“That’s just it,” Morgan sighed, “I’ve been down there every damned night for the last two weeks! What are they trying to do? Don’t they know that the change comes only on the first night of the full moon?”
“Mister, I’m just an inmate here.”
“You and me both.”
The elevator slowed to a stop and the doors slid open. Half a dozen frantic men waited on the other side of the doors; the independent journey of Morgan and his companion had already created a state of alert throughout the building.
“Hi, guys,” Morgan said, “sorry we didn’t wait for you.”
The angry men flooded into the car and rushed the two patients into their waiting cells.
Meg Talley was unable to rouse any kind of response from the three people who were taking her to the detention floor, in spite of the fact that she was trying urgently to elicit some sort of reaction from them. To her, this upcoming night was the 14th, and she had survived what had been her night of crisis already.
“Listen, I understand that if this is classified or confidential or whatever you call it you won’t be able to tell me all about what’s going on, but you can still explain why I have to go down there again, can’t you?” she asked as they wheeled her from the elevator into the small room. “I mean, have the doctors discovered something about the disease? Can it come back at any time instead of just on the night of the full moon?”
Neither of the orderlies or the doctor looked at her or broke the silence.
“Come on, last night was the 13th!” Her voice rose higher than she had intended. “I came through that, don’t you understand? I spent the whole night here and nothing happened to me, so I’m not infected! Why are you bringing me back?”
Her only answer came in echoes.
Meg had recovered well from her beating at the monster’s hands, and when these people remained stonily uncommunicative, she leaped from the wheelchair to her feet. The action had been planned to draw some sort of reaction from the men, and in this it succeeded. Both of her arms were immediately grasped by the huge paws of the orderlies, and the doctor ordered her to be seated.
“All right, I will, but only if I get some answers, damn it!” she shouted. “Why am I being watched the night after the full moon? Do the other doctors suspect that the disease may show up at any time?”
The doctor paused for a moment and glanced down the hall at his colleagues, who were placing their charges in various cells with no indications of problems. “Okay, I’ll tell you this much: we have no reason to believe that the microorganisms, which can’t be detected by conventional examination, are thriving in your body, and there have been no indications thus far that the disease will vary the routine which seems to have held true for Gerald Cummings. That’s all that I can say.”
“But you didn’t tell me why I’m being kept in isolation for two nights in a row, or why the other girls in my room aren’t being locked up, too!”
“They are,” replied one of the orderlies. “The rest are being brought down separately.”
“Waverly!” the doctor snapped. “That’s enough!” The other man shut up and flushed with embarrassment. “Now get her inside!”
Meg recognized the futility of any further questions and allowed herself to be pushed into the waiting cell, which, just like the one in which she had spent the previous night, contained only a standard hospital bed, a reclining chair, and a table with a number of waiting-room magazines to help her pass the time. The door closed firmly, one might say hermetically, and left her in the terrifying quiet that would act as a slow torture until the hour of midnight, when she would discover whether Cummings, even though now dead, would return to destroy her forever.
Meg glanced up at the camera lenses set out of harm’s way in the ceiling above her. “Well, P.T., I guess it’s just you and me again until this mess is cleared up.”
The intelligence monitoring her on the video system said nothing.
“It’s time, Blake,” Dr. Hanagata said in a tone that sounded as if she were a sad prison chaplain ready to lead him to the gas chamber.
Corbett laid aside the copy of The New York Times that he had been reading and looked briefly at his watch. Five o’clock. It wouldn’t yet be dark outside, he realized, but nightfall wouldn’t be long in arriving, either, since this was January. January 13. He stood next to the short woman and smiled at her with real affection. “Someone once said that the only undefeated warrior to be found in the Universe is the old man with the sickle.”
“You said that, in Horror of Collinsville, if memory serves me,” she pointed out. “Gentlemen, if you will …”
The familiar pair of orderlies whom Corbett had quickly renamed “The Corsican Brothers” obediently appeared in the doorway to his room, pushing a wheelchair before them. The writer looked at it quizzically.
“It’s procedure,” Hanagata explained. “Just like in the civilian hospitals, we’re supposed to ride our patients about like newborns; but since your worst injuries were to your upper body and not your legs or feet, I’ve been lax enough to allow you walking privileges. Tonight being what it is, just about every eye involved in this situation will be watching, so I reverted to being hardnosed.”
Corbett laughed and sat in the chair. “I certainly wouldn’t want to get you into trouble with the big bosses, Edie,” he said. “Besides, I never was the athletic type.”
The procession from the hospital room to the observation cell was, on the surface, reminiscent of a funeral, and there was good reason for the comparison. Blake Corbett had been chosen by those who made the decisions to be kept fully aware of all of the external circumstances while he recovered in the private federal hospital and awaited the night of his most important self-revelation. He knew the (correct) date, the possibility that he was carrying the lycanthropic infection in his body, the cautionary measures that would be taken with him that evening, and even the exact time, this from the watch that he wore just below the heavy bandaging which still covered his mangled left forearm.
The television programs he had seen during the past month, including the news broadcasts, had been unedited, just as the newspapers and magazines that he read came to him complete. From these sources, he had learned that the actual facts of that December night at the Institute were yet being kept secret from the public under a veil of national security. The intentionally leaked story was that an extremist’s bombing had created a situation which was being carefully monitored by federal investigators and physicians.
While the families and friends of literally hundreds of Institute employees, consultants, patients, and newspeople has passed through Christmas and New Year’s without knowing if their loved one were alive or dead, the media and national gossip lines had come up with countless incredible explanations for what had happened at the Institute and why the government was keeping a tight lid on it. The most far-fetched of these tales were still conservative when compared to the real events of that night.
Corbett had been informed early on that the wounds he had sustained in the various battles with Cummings had defied categorization, thus depriving him of the knowledge of whether they came from claws or saliva-dripping teeth, and this official openness concerning his condition was maintained for a definite reason. The medical investigators wanted him to be in a certain, informed state at the time of his possible transformation in order to compare his responses with those of men and women who had been manipulated in other psychological manners.
Blake was more than halfway certain that the pain he had experienced when Cummings caught his arm through the window of the police car had been from needle-sharp teeth, rather than claws, but he was not the type to work himself into a state of worry that might result in his becoming a “psychosomatic lycanthrope”, as Loraine Powell had described Cummings so long ago, when they all had been so ignorant. No, he would wait for twelve o’clock and allow the physical world to decide the future of his life.
“Here we are, Mr. Corbett,” said one of the orderlies, breaking the shell of concentration which had enveloped him. The man’s voice sounded like that of a sympathetic murderer. “You have to get out now and spend the night in this room. I’m afraid there’s no TV, but you have a comfortable bed, an easy chair, and plenty of magazines to keep you occupied. I know how much you like to read.”
Blake stood from the chair and walked into the small room. It looked sturdy enough to contain the explosion of a medium-sized bomb, which it might well have to, in an allegorical sense. The thick walls were covered on the inside with a dense layer of rubber-like cushioning to protect a violent occupant from himself. How many imaginary characters had he blithely relegated to padded cells in his literary life? He laughed bitterly, hoping they were watching from whatever form of Heaven that discarded fictions went to.
“Your supper will be brought to you at six-thirty,” Dr. Edie Hanagata told him, “and there are adequate toilet facilities beneath the bed.”
“Glorified bedpans,” he replied in a joking tone.
She nodded. “I’ll see you in the morning, Blake.”
“Take care of yourself, Doctor.”
One of the orderlies left the room with the wheelchair, but the second stood for a moment, nervously looking at the floor; then he turned back to Blake and offered him his right hand. Corbett took it.
“Mr. Corbett,” the big man mumbled, eloquent in his lack of articulateness. “I’ve brought a lot of you folks down here this afternoon, a lot of you survivors, I mean, and I’ve wished all of them good luck. The same goes for you.”
“Thanks, Glen,” he answered, and the man left.
“We’re not supposed to be alone in here, but I’d like to wish you luck, as well,” Edie said.
“I appreciate that, you sexy little general practitioner,” he said with a smile.
She sighed. “Oh god, you’re incorrigible!” Then, taking him completely by surprise, she darted forward, stretched to her full height, and kissed him on the cheek; before he could respond, she had closed the door behind her.
Blake looked at the cameras which he knew were already recording every second that passed in the cell and shrugged. “It’s this blasted Corbett charm,” he told the faceless observer. “I can’t turn it off.”
But he didn’t laugh at his own joke. He knew that the time for laughter was long past.
They faced the night alone.
The four people who had seen the nightmare in its true clothing, even while it was developing, the four people who had cried out the warning, fought for belief in their words, and finally met the terrible embodiment of the evil that others refused to accept, only to become both victims and saviors, these people now waited in separate cells to discover how much more of them would be required by the thing that they had uncovered.
Other people who had felt the fury of Gerald Cummings were in the building, trapped in the same mental torment of expectation: Bradley Ferguson, Loraine Powell, Bernard Gurren, Michael Darrow, Agnes Vaughn, Barry Druitt, Max Coslo, and more than a hundred other men and women. But for them it was all the result of a single incident of which they had had the misfortune to be a part. Dorothy Taylor, Audrey Tucker, and Arthur Langrum each sat alone on that night, Waiting. But Douglas Morgan, Meg Talley, Nick Grundel, and Blake Corbett had realized from the beginning of their involvement what they risked, and this coming midnight would decide how much they would be required to pay.
Only Corbett had a way of knowing exactly when the moment would arrive, so while his three companions waited, tortured by their ignorance (naturally, sleep was impossible, even for Morgan, who had lived through this experience on dry runs already), the writer sat in the chair and followed the inexorable sweep of the second hand. He knew that the timepiece was within half a minute of the service clock on the wall in his hospital room.
And so they faced it without so much as the comfort of the presence of one another.
It started with an itch. Immobile for the better part of a month and subject to the minor bed-related skin problems, he had experienced the lesser demonic tortures of itching a number of times, but never quite like this. This was no isolated nagging inside of a cast or the blanket effect of pressure irritation. It came suddenly and seemingly on every inch of his body.
“Hey, Leo!” he shouted into the open microphone, “you forgot to leave me a scratching stick! And it’s hot in here! Cut back on the furnace!”
It was hot, abruptly hot, humid, nearly sweltering. There was no reason for such a jump in temperature. Sweat rolled off his face into the crisp sheets, and he felt as if he were being boiled in his pajamas. He tried to deny the one possible cause of this discomfort with prosaic reassurances of fever and self-induced hysteria, but the always cynically clear-sighted portion of his mind that made him the man he was laughed from the back of his skull at this pitiful grasping at straws.
“Leo, old man!” he yelled. “Crank up those cameras and point them in my direction! Get all of it, because this is going to be one hell of a show!”
Sharp pains raced outward from the center of his chest and stomach, and the convulsive upheavals began just as Cummings had described them. Rolling to his left and tearing free of the monitoring equipment, he puked until it felt as if everything but his bones had been spilled on the floor, and then the body-wide trembling hit like an electric current surging through his soul.
After almost a minute of the most terrible internal struggle he had ever known, he conquered the shaking and stared at the left hand which had been taken from him by the surgeon’s knife just weeks before. It was back, now, growing before his frozen gaze from a newborn baby’s fist that protruded from his slump through childhood size to the familiar hand that was identical to the one lost. Of course; the little monsters now multiplying in his bloodstream had to have a perfect form as host!
“See? Look at it, Leo!” he screamed, waving the hand at the cameras. “It’s happening!” Fear and elation burned through him. “Oh my God! Leo, it hurts, it—”
The hair raced over his flesh, his mouth was filled with blood and teeth that had pushed themselves from his gums, and his nails fell from his hands and feet to leave little red fountains welling over the bedclothes, while an atomic power-plant burst in his chest and sent him leaping from the bed with a wild cry from the depths of his being.
“Jesus, why?” he asked with the last fragments of a rational mind.
Then he knew. It was all so wonderfully clear and perfect and he was whole for the first time in his entire existence. It was marvelous, orgasmically overpowering, and the greatest sensation imaginable. All that he had to have to reach the quintessential state of perfection was the only real food, living human flesh and blood!
Nicolas Grundel roared for the first time, tore the flimsy gown from his new form, and attacked the cell door with all of his madness.
There were forty-six people on the panel, specialists from all over the Free World. Before them reared a wall-sized panel containing one hundred and fifty television screens. One hundred and nineteen of these were activated.
On eighty-four of those activated screens, men and women of all ages and backgrounds were metamorphosing into insane and unbelievable creatures that were both less and more than human. The sounds from the rooms of the victims were almost as awful as the pictures.
One man who, like everyone else in the group, was unable to tear his eyes from the incredible display, whispered drily, “Jesus Christ, what if they live forever?”
The government jet touched down at L.A. International in the early morning hours of April 14 without publicity and with no coverage by the news media, which was just as it had been planned. The three passengers who had been aboard the plane had not even been allowed to notify their families that they finally would be released from the official custody of the United States government; throughout the nation, dozens of other such flights were delivering other fortunate survivors of the interview with Gerald Cummings to their home cities. In the case of the foreign correspondents, trans-oceanic flights were also taking place at no cost to the passengers or their employers.
These people had been proven to be free from infection by living through four full moon cycles without displaying any signs of the Change. Their cooperation in the upcoming grand scheme had been insured by various means, so the flights were, in a modest way, going-away presents.
Two men, one moving carefully with the aid of a cane, and one woman were cordially assisted from the jet and directed toward the passenger exit. The trio walked through the night to resume lives that would never be the same as before they had encountered the impossible.
“‘Remember your agreements and the best interests of the human race,’” quoted the young woman in a tone dripping with disgust. “Who the hell are they to blackmail us into keeping quiet about this?”
“They’re the boys in charge, Meg,” answered the limping man. “They would rather take the heat from an outraged public concerning the accidental release of an engineered super cold germ than admit the reality of lycanthropy, and maybe they’re right.”
“Right?” Meg repeated incredulously. “What about the lives they’ve ruined? What about the eighty or ninety people they claim are dead and who are really prisoners for the rest of their lives, including Nick?”
“They’re infected,” Douglas Morgan explained. “You know that, and they hardly could be left running around free, could they?”
“For six or eight hours a month they’re dangerous! You can’t tell me that merits a life sentence!”
The third member of the group spoke up, “I don’t believe it has anything much to do with the danger they represent; it’s probably due to what they represent in the way of physical evolution. If the studies being carried out break the code, the entire world could benefit by what we went through. That’s about the only thing that I can imagine that would begin to pay me back for that night.” He looked at the stars as they approached the runway. “Damn, the book I was going to write about all of this … now I can’t say anything about it other than we all came down with cases of mutant pneumonia.”
“Well, I don’t care what I signed; I’m going to get Nick out of there!” Meg stated firmly.
“My dear, you utter one word of truth about what happened at the Institute once we pass back into normal society, and Meg Talley will be reclaimed as a potential disease carrier before the sun comes up,” Morgan predicted.
“Didn’t they do a terrific job of brainwashing you,” laughed Corbett. “I never thought that Doug Morgan, the Champion of Exotic Lost Causes, would espouse the Establishment Lie in connection with the first magnificent confirmation of one of those causes.”
Morgan stopped walking and glanced to either side to see if anyone could possibly overhear the conversation before replying in a tight whisper, “Goddamn it, don’t you see what I’m doing? They’ll be living with us for years to come, waiting for one slip to send us back into their custody permanently! This is the top bracket in surveillance and covert operations, and you know that if they released more than fifty reporters with a story like this with only their promises not to reveal the real facts until ‘all of the information is evaluated’, they’re going to be in on every spoken thought of each of us! There are undoubtedly listening devices trained on us right now!
“But if you think I’m going to play dead with what I know, after what I saw and went through, you might as well check your brains in for hat racks! This is mine! I paid for it with years of work, and I will get this to the public! Maybe not tonight or tomorrow or even this year, but just as soon as I can find the way, the whole world is going to hear Doug Morgan’s story! As God is my witness, I’ll find a way to do it!”
Meg was left speechless by the low-volume outburst, but Corbett was inspired to relieved laughter and a short round of applause. “My faith in the integrity of the human race is restored, Doug, and I believe every word that you’ve told us! All I can add is just be careful!”
“If I were smart, I wouldn’t have exploded with that incriminating garbage,” Morgan said. “Come on; let’s get inside so I can find a taxi and go see my wife!”
An awful thought struck Meg abruptly. “My family—I was only allowed to write them that once, so they aren’t even sure that I’m still alive!” She started to run toward the airport, but stopped just as suddenly and, in synchronization with Doug, turned to stare almost sadly at Blake.
“Corbett, uh, if you don’t have anywhere to go …” Morgan began awkwardly.
Blake grinned and for an instant reminded both of them of a bearded friend they’d left behind. “Thanks, but I have to get immediately to the home of a beautiful young lady and take care of a small matter of three back alimony payments.” They resumed walking, and he added—this time with a real trace of melancholy—”There’s only one thing that really bothers me.”
“And that is?” asked Meg on cue.
“As much as I hated the entire experience, as much as it terrified and sickened me to see the troll in good lives, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to reach that weird peak of … of vitality again. I think that I’m like some motorcycle jockey, addicted to the thrills.”
“You’ve got your work,” Doug said.
“Sure, but can fiction ever approach Gerald Cummings? Move over, Morgan, make room for the world’s newest monster hunter.”
“Welcome aboard.”
They finally reached the airport and unconsciously adjusted the false outer selves that they would have to wear until the day, if ever, that Morgan bombed the public consciousness with the incredible truth. While it was three-fifteen on a very young Saturday morning, a number of outgoing passengers were waiting to board their flights to Wherever. Loud music from a handheld radio blared at them as they passed, but a sudden, stentorian announcement warning the station’s listeners to stay tuned for an important new bulletin shocked them into immobility just as it caught the attention of everyone else within earshot.
Following the required three second pause during which no hearts beat, the high, scratchy, and barely intelligible voice of a foreign correspondent came on the air with the news that a large Japanese fishing craft had been attacked and sunk off of the island of Oshima by what the survivors to a man described as a gigantic, amphibious relic from the age of dinosaurs.
Once, each of the three would have listened to the report with avid interest but dismissed the chances of it being proven true, but everything was different now.
“The thing that the Air Force pilot cabled us about last August!” shouted Corbett.
“Godzilla Alive!” Meg screamed.
“I’ve got to go,” Morgan declared like a man experiencing a religious vision. “Jeeze, this is the event that they can’t hide, and I’ve got to be there to cover it!”
“You’ll never get out of the country,” Blake said, referring to their ever-present, if invisible, escort.
“Oh yes I will! I know a man—passports, names, flight tickets, he can handle anything! I’m getting out tomorrow afternoon!” He pointed at his two companions, “Blake? Meg?”
“Where?” Corbett asked.
“What time?” echoed Meg.
“My house, two o’clock tomorrow afternoon!” Morgan answered. “Not a word to anybody else!”
“You’ve got it!” Blake laughed. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”