The Hospital Job Part 1
The above by monica_catch22
The above by weaselett
Title: The Hospital Job Part 1
Author: Shannonrita
Beta(s): Havenward
Artists: monica_catch22 weaselett (View Weaselette's art Here!
Characters/Pairings: Leverage crew, Nate/Eliot (hinted at), Hardison/OMC, Sanctuary
Rating: NC-17 for sexual situations along with extreme violence/death/zombie type things
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy
Warnings/spoilers: Graphic violence as I’m a drama queen when it comes to blood and guts. This also could be considered a furry story, even though I’ve never thought of Joven that way.
Word Count: 24,000 or there abouts
Summary: Our favorite cons are hired to bring back proof of experiments from a hospital that’s been abandoned for five years. Everything inside it should be dead. What, or rather who they find changes them all in one way or another.
Author’s Note: Words in italics are either memories or thoughts, depending on the situation. They’re pretty self evident. Joven's speach is another thing that's deserving of a mention. He has an issue with his speech, so everything he says is spelled out phonetically. Also, the story jumps around in snapshots, but each area is separated by some type of detail. Feedback is appreciated, good bad or indifferent. Seriously. Lemme know what y’all think!
Author's Note #2: I forgot to mention something! Blondie, Baby Girl and Riley are all part of the Spy!Verse that Havenward has whipped up. She's let me borrow versions of them. Blondie is Steve Carlson, Baby Girl is Abby from NCIS, and Riley is none other than Riley Smith.
Sophie smiled at the frighteningly thin blonde woman reassuringly. “Just tell me where the hospital is and we’ll be done here.”
The woman, Karen, looked at her husband Rich and sighed. “That’s the problem. Nobody knows where it is. It exists, it’s there, but…other than being in Colorado, nobody’s ever had proof.”
“I see,” Sophie murmured. “Do you know how many acres the hospital occupies?”
Karen nodded. “400 exactly.”
“There’s the invisible gate,” Hardison pointed the wires out as the van slowed to a stop. “According to our tree huggers, every test subject has a chip implanted someplace in them that causes them to expire when they pass these wires.”
“Makes you wonder what the hell’s in there,” Eliot growled.
Nate put his foot on the gas wordlessly, not wanting to voice his agreement with Eliot’s words.
“What kind of tests were run there?”
Rich shook his head, visibly shuddered. “Awful ones. The hospital was opened up in the early 60s and had cutting edge technology. They were doing things there with DNA and genome sequences before the modern world even knew what those things were.”
“And viruses,” Karen said. “They were always trying to create new viruses. Their main revenue came from biological weapons.”
“Were any ever successful,” Sophie asked, frowning.
“Not that we’re aware of. Most creations were too…unstable. They wouldn’t last outside a host for more than a few hours. And once combined with a host’s blood and/or DNA, they mutated quickly.”
“How quickly?”
“Hours,” Rich said softly. “The results ranged from madness to homicidal rage.”
The van continued along the overgrown driveway and after twenty minutes, Nate was beginning to think they were in the wrong place. Then, the tree line broke and they saw it.
Huge and intimidating, the white hospital styled building looked extremely out of place. No trees around it for acres and the grass impossibly overgrown, it was the perfect setting for a horror movie. There was a steel door covering what Nate assumed would be glass, and even from this far away Nate could see an LED light blinking at him from a black pad next to the steel. “They have Access Control,” he murmured.
“If it’s computerized, I can get into it,” Hardison chirped, even though everyone already knew he could.
“It’s ten stories tall?”
“Above ground, yeah,” Rich said. At Sophie’s look he smirked. “They did most of the work underground. Ten stories above, 20 stories below. They’ve got a total of 30 stories worth of work space, and the structure below ground has more lateral space than the building above. They branched out and created entire environments for their subjects.”
“Just so everyone’s clear, I’m not going in any air ducts in this place.” Parker sounded nervous when she spoke.
“Wouldn’t dream of asking you to, believe me,” Nate reassured her. “We’re sticking to each other like glue on this one. Get in, get the evidence, get out.” He climbed out of the van and walked to the front of it.
Eliot looked back at the trees, convinced he could feel someone watching them.
*_*_*
Up in one of the trees, well out of sight of the team they’d hired, Rich lowered his binoculars and looked at Karen. “Think any of them are alive in there?”
She shook her head. “I doubt it. How would they have survived for five years without food?”
“The cat could’ve figured something out.”
Snorting, she took the binoculars from Rich and raised them to her eyes. “Without his handlers he’s useless.”
“What if he’s not though. What if he really was the end all be all they thought he was?”
Karen smirked and shrugged. “We’ll let these idiots do the hard work, then come in and grab the cat. Then, we’ll send his head to my mother in a pretty hat box.”
*_*_*
“Do we really wanna let Hardison have a gun?” Eliot asked, trying to make a joke. They were inside the building now, walking slowly and peering into every cubby hole and office. It was a relief that they hadn’t run across any of these so called ‘experiments’ just yet.
But it was also creepy. If over a thousand people had been caught in the building when the accident occurred, wouldn’t there be bodies? Traces? Something?
Instead, there was a gloomy silence, the fluorescent lights flickering above them helping to give the shadows more substance.
“Not like you’ll carry a gun,” the geek growled. He motioned with his head when he saw the security office. “There, security. They’ll have the camera system hub in there.”
Nate nodded. “See if you can get into it. Maybe the cameras are still functional.”
They all moved into the office, looking around nervously as Hardison set up his laptop. Eliot walked over to a desk and looked at the blotter. Drops of dirty reddish brown covered the yellowed paper in a spray pattern that indicated someone’s main artery had been severed. He picked up a picture frame and looked at the face of a little boy and girl that stared back at him. Something about this scene wasn’t right…didn’t make sense…
“The pictures,” Sophie said as she looked at another desk. “None of the pictures have dust on them.”
Nate walked over to the final desk where there was a pile of necklaces, rings and other trinkets all neatly arranged. “Someone brought these items back in here. Set them up, keeps coming back to keep the pictures clean.”
“It’s a shrine,” Eliot whispered.
As they all looked at each other, nobody was watching Hardison’s computer to see what looked like a tiger dangle something into a large tank of water, then snatch at something beneath the surface.
*_*_*
They continued walking through the hospital, trying to find their way down to the lower part of the building. Stairwells headed up, but none went down. There was a section of the hospital they couldn’t get to, and it was Eliot who noticed a window high above them had been broken out. There were what looked like claw marks around it and under it. Long, deep claw marks.
Finally, they found something that looked like an elevator, but it was like none they’d ever seen before. It was a round metal disk in the center of a large lobby, surrounded by clear glass. Off to the right side of the platform was a column with buttons on it.
The five of them looked at the elevator platform, none of them comfortable in this deserted hospital. The cameras hadn’t been able to show them much of anything except more shadows and tricks. They had traveled down one hallway after another, marking their way with words on the walls. Getting lost in this place wasn’t an option.
They’d passed other offices, what appeared to be nurses stations and security posts and found several things in common. All the pictures were cleaned and any personal affects had been returned or placed somewhere communal. There were traces of blood and violence, but no bodies.
Now, as they all looked at the strange elevator, they wondered if the people were down there, waiting to greet them with twisted bodies and grotesque grins.
Slowly, they edged their way onto the metal disc and Nate pressed one of the buttons. Sophie gasped when they began to descend. The elevator moved slowly, affording them a view of different floors, most with open layouts. When they were about half way between the floor and the ceiling of each level, lights flickered on and illuminated all manner of things.
On at least one level, they’d seen vines that seemed to pulsate with life and Parker was convinced she saw one reaching out toward the glass enclosure from the corner of her eye. On another, giant frog like…things hopped quickly toward the elevator. Nate hoped the glass would keep them out, because their teeth looked as sharp as Eliot’s knives.
“Nate, stop the lift,” Eliot said as they were lowered into yet another level, a huge skeletal something-or-other in the middle of the room. “El, that’s not a good idea…”
“C’mon, stop. Ain’t nothin’ else in here.”
What possessed him, Nate didn’t know but he hit the button, hoping that it wouldn’t stop the lift but it did. Eliot slowly stepped off the platform and walked to the skeleton. Eliot was a small man, but the skull he was approaching would dwarf Hardison easily.
The long haired man looked up at the remains, his mind trying to comprehend what he was seeing. It was the skull of a snake, at least thirteen feet tall with fangs as big as him. He looked back at the rest of the team, then at the skeleton. “This could be our proof here,” he said softly. “Things like this ain’t natural, unless maybe there was somethin’ goin’ on back in the dino-days that ain’t nobody mentioned.”
“See if you can pull a bone off,” Nate said nodding. “Then we’re outta here.”
Eliot nodded and reached out toward the nearest fang. His fingers barely brushed the thing when the entire skeleton shuddered and then collapsed, sending a huge cloud of bone dust covering everything, including him.
“Eliot!” one of the girls screamed and he could hear everyone rushing over to him. He stood there, stunned, hand still outstretched. In a few seconds, a wet cloth was passing over his face. Nate’s hankerchief he realized, probably doused with water from a bottle in Hardison’s pack. He finally looked at all of them and shook his head. “Bones don’t just turn to dust. Not unless…”
“Unless what?” Hardison asked, dusting Eliot’s shoulder’s back and chest off.
“Unless that,” Eliot said, voice rising. “Back to the elevator, NOW!”
Nobody questioned him, nobody looked, they just ran. Nate was there last and his hand slammed the button, the glass barrier sliding back into place just as something smacked into it wetly. Nate looked over his shoulder and wished he hadn’t.
There was a web on the barrier, a spider web. And it was attached to what looked like a tarantula. If tarantulas were the size of couches.
“Spiders,” Eliot panted, eyes wide with horror and disbelief. “Their venom could have gotten into the snake’s system long before it died, gotten into its bones. Made ‘em brittle as paper.”
“Spiders shouldn’t be that big,” Sophie whimpered.
“Neither should snakes.”
They didn’t make any more stops and didn’t want to think of what they’d find at the bottom.
*_*_*
When the elevator finally came to a stop, they found themselves in a long hallway. When the glass lowered, the stench made Hardison vomit. Even Eliot had a hard time keeping his belly in his body.
There were at least a dozen bodies in view, in varying states of decay. Some were missing arms, others legs, and some were missing everything from the waist down. “What the hell happened here,” Parker whispered as she and Sophie clung to each other.
The corridor was dark, only one out of every three lights flickering tiredly, and the men tried to keep the girls between them. They didn’t know what they could do, but better than letting the women take the full brunt of…whatever.
They rounded a corner and saw an office with several computers. “Let’s see if anything’s in here,” Nate nodded. The name plate on the door indicated “Executive Director”, so maybe there was something they could use. The five of them moved into the office and Hardison set his lap top up, hooking it into the computer.
Nate sat down in a relatively clean chair and rubbed his hands over his face. He watched as Eliot kept an eye on the hallway, knife twirling in his fingers. Sophie was looking around and Parker stood in the corner, arms wrapped around herself. “I think we need to make a rule,” Nate murmured. “No more jobs involving bio weapons or viruses.”
“You will not hear me complain,” Hardison said with a sigh, then perked up. “Damn, about time! This hub is part of the main network. Everything about this place is stored on servers these machines are using.”
“Can you get anything?” Eliot asked, heading over to look over Hardison’s shoulder.
“I can get everything,” he smirked. He was quiet for a few minutes, words and images flying across the screen, prompting a frown.
*_*_*
The cameras panned along, following the team as a woman in a chic business suit watched the screen. She drummed her well manicured nails on the varnished table top, lips pursed in an almost angry gesture. “So our best programmers couldn’t get these cameras up and running, but this Hardison boy did?”
“Yes Ma’am,” someone replied softly.
She stood smoothly, one well manicured brow arched. “Request some new programmers from The Elders. Everyone we have now is going to be reassigned.”
“To what department Ma’am?” A secretary had risen and was tapping at her portable keyboard.
The woman smirked, a decidedly cruel expression. “Research and development. I hear Dr. Casey has come up with a new way to custom create Abnormals. Brain dead humans will make the perfect guinea pigs, don’t you think?”
The secretary said nothing, just walked along, typing out the request. She knew better than to voice her opinion.
*_*_*
Hold on to your hats! Part 2 is over here!