A New Story-Chapter 4
Jun. 25th, 2015 03:23 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
lindafishes8.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
section7mfuWord count- Approximately 9,300. Gen-language.
Work is complete and will be posted this week in Section VII.
Thank you to my friends who helped beta this story.
Many thanks to Open_channel_d for her kind assist with Russian translations.
Link to Chapters 1, 2 & 3
http://archiveofourown.org/works/4184337/chapters/9449109
Open Arms
Sometimes ghosts from agent’s missions come back to haunt them and Illya’s past is full of them.
Chapter 4
It was well after dark when Napoleon Solo and Mark Slate broke into the long abandoned Open Arms Mental Asylum. Located on Hart Island, New York, it was founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This small island was on the western end of Long Island Sound.
They entered the crumbling building through a skylight on the roof of the main building.
The roof assault was necessary as the men from U.N.C.L.E. found every entrance to be a heavy metal door barred from the inside and stealth was the word of the night.
The agents had already captured two THRUSH guards who were patrolling the grounds. The guards had been handcuffed, gagged and quickly turned over to the ground support team from Section Three. A helicopter and medical team waited, not far away, on stand-by alert.
The enforcement team was closing in on the homing beacon of a missing agent. The search had been narrowed to this building although the exact location eluded them. The beacon was a new innovation from UNCLE’s security labs. It had been sewn under one of the missing agent’s many scars and only a handful of agents carried the new technology as it was still in its experimental stage.
Armed with flashlights and their Walthers, they proceeded to search the hospital, one floor at a time.
Napoleon was leery to break up the pair in order to search separately though the task would have been accomplished more quickly, there was safety in numbers. Mark and he needed to quickly and quietly check every room of the four story building, working their way down.
The hallways, with walls cracked and peeling, were painted a sickly shade of green. Rusty iron bars covered every window. The place reeked of dust, mildew and decay. Somewhere, the eerie echo of a dripping faucet broke the utter silence of the place.
Pieces of worn-out furniture and equipment, rusty metal bed frames with moth-eaten, stained mattresses, a broken wooden wheelchair with restraining belts laid on its side, even a few chipped porcelain bedpans could be found in the rooms and hallways of the asylum.
Solo shuddered, imagining people being kept in a place such as this. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end when they entered one hallway. It was as if long forgotten souls of patients who had died here were roaming the corridors, trying in vain to find their way out.
They searched room after cob webby empty room, finding nothing, not even footprints on the dusty floors. Large wards where many patients were kept made up most of the second floor.
At one point, a solitary rat crossed their path startling Mark. He jumped a half foot in the air. Napoleon would have chuckled at the absurdity of an enforcement agent of Mark’s caliber reacting that way if he himself didn’t find this place leaving his nerves on edge as well.
When they reached the rear of the main floor, the old hospital took on a different atmosphere. It was sparkling clean. The floors practically gleamed, there was a coat of fresh paint, light blue this time, and even the air was cleaner; it certainly smelled better.
Suddenly, they heard the squeaking pulleys and grinding, unoiled gears of an ancient elevator starting up from below.
Both edged carefully down the deserted corridor towards the source of the noise. Positioning themselves on either side of the doors as to not be seen, Mark and Napoleon waited to see at what floor the car would stop.
It ground to a halt on the main floor and once the lift doors opened, the single occupant, an unarmed man in a rumpled but clean T-shirt and denim overalls opened the gate and stepped out. He was in his mid-twenties, tall and thin, with reddish brown curly hair.
Both agents trained their weapons on the startled man. “And who might you be?” Solo asked quietly.
“Pl...Please don’t shoot me,” the man stammered, “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”
“Let us be the judge of that.” The CEA gave the man the once-over. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
“Please put that gun away, mister. I’m Zachary Jenks. You can call me Zack, everybody does. I was just gonna go outside for a smoke. Doc Rädsla, she don’t allow no smokin’ in the building. She says I gotta listen and do everythin’ she says or I’m out on my keister. Are you gonna put them guns away or not? I don’t like guns much.”
Mark frisked the man and found no weapons.
“Hey, stop that, mister. Yer tickling me,” Zack giggled.
Napoleon frowned at him. He knew this man’s last name from somewhere, but it eluded him for now. “What is Dr. Rädsla doing here? We need to find her.”
“Oh she’s sperimentin’. Maybe she’s done now. You guys gonna talk with her? She’s ain’t gonna like that. Nope, she’s ain’t gonna like that one bit. She likes her privacy.”
“Who else is here, Zack? Besides you and the doctor?”
“Oh. I know this! There’s them two dirty bird guards. They’s outside now, patrollin’. Oops! I’m not ‘sposed to call them ‘dirty birds.’ You won’t tell the doc, will ya? I’ll get into a mess o’trouble agin.”
“Dirty birds?” Mark asked, barely suppressing a chuckle, “Do you mean THRUSH?”
“Yup. That’s it. They’s got guns too, jus like you two, only they’s got rifles. I don’t like them rifles. What’s you plannin’ on doin’?”
“Is there anyone else here, Zack?” Mark continued.
“Yup. That Max fella. I don’t like him much neither. He hits me when I work too slow.”
“Anyone else?”
“Let me think. There’s doc and Max, them two guards and Oh yeah! That blond guy. Mister Curry-A-Kin.”
Zackary Jenks seemed pleased that he remembered all that had been asked of him. He smiled broadly at Mark and Napoleon; a wide, nearly toothless grin.
“Where are Dr. Rädsla, Max Cooper and Mr. Kuryakin?” Napoleon asked.
“Basement.”
“Let’s all go down there, shall we?”
Solo eyed the elevator. He didn’t want to announce their arrival with that loud, squeaking antique.
“Is there a stairway down to the basement, Zack?”
"Sure! Come on, I’ll show ya.” He hesitated and threw the agents a sideways glance.
“Hey now! Wait just a gosh-darn minute. Youse didn’t tell me your names.”
Solo was good at reading people and felt he could trust this man to tell him the truth. He seemed earnest when he answered their questions even if he wasn’t playing with a full deck.
“You can call me Mr. Solo and my friend’s name is Mr. Slate. Can you remember our names Mr. Jenks?”
Napoleon suddenly remembered where he’d heard the ‘Jenks’ name before. Captain Dennis Jenks ran a THRUSH school for boys along with Mother Fear in Switzerland. Illya and he had shut down the school last year. Captain Jenks was in prison and Mother Fear had been killed.
“Mister, you jus made me a happy man. Nobody’s ever called me ‘mister’ before.”
“Well now, I’m glad I made you happy. Are you a relative of Dennis Jenks? A brother, perhaps?” Napoleon asked.
Slate nodded at Solo knowingly. He had read the report on The Children’s Day Affair and was aware of the THRUSH school as well.
“No sir! I ain’t got no brother. I am his cousin sure ‘nuff though. I don’t never see him much. He lives in a place called Yer-up now. Doc Rädsla told me that.”
Before they reached the basement, Zack was instructed to not make any noise and to only speak at a whisper.
The basement was well lit and the three men made their way down a long corridor with Napoleon in the lead.
Zack stopped and pointed into one of the rooms. He remembered to whisper.
“This here’s where Mister Max pretended with that yeller haired man. See them tables and candles? They was play actin’ they was in one of them fancy I-talian eateries. It was jus’ take-out. I got to be the waiter. He paused and stood a little taller, reciting his lines. “Please be careful, gentlemen. Plates are very hot.”
Zack paused in the doorway of another, much smaller room. Solo peered in.
“What was going on in here?” Napoleon stepped inside. On a whim, he flipped on the light switch. Bright fluorescent ceiling fixtures illuminated the dreary room; he observed only a battered leather couch, a desk and an old desk chair.
“Um, that’s s’posed to be his office. Nuttin in there but old furniture I got at a second hand store. And that there room ‘cross the way, his bedroom.”
“Whose bedroom?” Mark asked just to clarify. “And what do you mean they were ‘play acting?’ ”
“That feller with the yeller hair,” Zach grinned. “Ceptin, he ain’t got no yeller hair no more. The next room’s the Doc’s office. I’s not posed to go in there.” Zack was pointing into yet another room.
Solo pressed for the answer to the second part of Mark’s question. “What do you mean they were play acting?”
“Play actin? You know, pretendin’ that them rooms was real places. The pretended they was in a fancy place to eat when it wasn’t and that bedroom was Curry-a-kin’s own bedroom back where he lives for real.”
“And this office was supposed to be his real office?”
“Yup! Back where he works at his uncle’s place.”
“Check out the Doctors office, Mark,” Solo ordered. “We’ll keep going. Photograph anything you think might be related to the experiment.”
“No problem, guv.”
As soon as Agent Slate entered the office, his eyes were riveted to a blackboard.
“May I be of some assistance?” A man’s sleepy voice came from behind Mark. He spun around to see a man in his fifties, dark hair, about Solo’s height and build, standing in the doorway clad in dark blue pajamas and slippers.
Angry at himself for being caught unawares, Mark barked out “Where’s Illya Kuryakin?”
With Mark’s gun in his face, Max Cooper quickly divulged Kuryakin’s location and what was happening to him at this very moment. Cooper was subsequently darted and left lying on the office floor.
Mark came flying down the hallway bellowing to Solo before catching up to him.
“We’ve got to hurry! Rädsla’s going to take a brain sample from Illya. They’re in the operating room now.”
“Son of a ...!” Solo hissed. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
He grabbed Zack with both hands. “Where’s the operating room?”
Zack tried to pull away, but Solo would have none of it.
“She made me scrub it clean this mornin’.”
“Where Zack? WHERE?” Napoleon demanded.
He pointed to the right. “It’s down the end of that there hallway.” Mark nodded.
Napoleon pulled Zack along before he was even finished talking. They turned the corner and started running towards the double swinging doors at the end.
A brain sample? What the hell has Illya gotten himself into this time? flashed through Napoleon’s mind as he released Zack and barreled down the corridor without him, at a pace that would have set a new speed record back at survival school.
Mark followed the two men ahead of him, giving them cover from any persons or guards who may heard the commotion and whom Zack may have forgotten to mention.
They heard a man’s scream.
The CEA was instantly on high alert, recognizing that that rather colorful Russian epithet had come from his partner.
Solo threw open the doors and ran into the makeshift operating room, noted Illya strapped down on a table, and saw the figure in green surgical garb, spattered in blood, pressing a drill into Kuryakin’s skull.
That was all Napoleon needed to see. He fired a bullet into Rädsla’s brain with a single shot, right between her eyes.
(Last chapter of Opens Arms will be posted tomorrow.)
Work is complete and will be posted this week in Section VII.
Thank you to my friends who helped beta this story.
Many thanks to Open_channel_d for her kind assist with Russian translations.
Link to Chapters 1, 2 & 3
http://archiveofourown.org/works/4184337/chapters/9449109
Open Arms
Sometimes ghosts from agent’s missions come back to haunt them and Illya’s past is full of them.
Chapter 4
It was well after dark when Napoleon Solo and Mark Slate broke into the long abandoned Open Arms Mental Asylum. Located on Hart Island, New York, it was founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This small island was on the western end of Long Island Sound.
They entered the crumbling building through a skylight on the roof of the main building.
The roof assault was necessary as the men from U.N.C.L.E. found every entrance to be a heavy metal door barred from the inside and stealth was the word of the night.
The agents had already captured two THRUSH guards who were patrolling the grounds. The guards had been handcuffed, gagged and quickly turned over to the ground support team from Section Three. A helicopter and medical team waited, not far away, on stand-by alert.
The enforcement team was closing in on the homing beacon of a missing agent. The search had been narrowed to this building although the exact location eluded them. The beacon was a new innovation from UNCLE’s security labs. It had been sewn under one of the missing agent’s many scars and only a handful of agents carried the new technology as it was still in its experimental stage.
Armed with flashlights and their Walthers, they proceeded to search the hospital, one floor at a time.
Napoleon was leery to break up the pair in order to search separately though the task would have been accomplished more quickly, there was safety in numbers. Mark and he needed to quickly and quietly check every room of the four story building, working their way down.
The hallways, with walls cracked and peeling, were painted a sickly shade of green. Rusty iron bars covered every window. The place reeked of dust, mildew and decay. Somewhere, the eerie echo of a dripping faucet broke the utter silence of the place.
Pieces of worn-out furniture and equipment, rusty metal bed frames with moth-eaten, stained mattresses, a broken wooden wheelchair with restraining belts laid on its side, even a few chipped porcelain bedpans could be found in the rooms and hallways of the asylum.
Solo shuddered, imagining people being kept in a place such as this. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end when they entered one hallway. It was as if long forgotten souls of patients who had died here were roaming the corridors, trying in vain to find their way out.
They searched room after cob webby empty room, finding nothing, not even footprints on the dusty floors. Large wards where many patients were kept made up most of the second floor.
At one point, a solitary rat crossed their path startling Mark. He jumped a half foot in the air. Napoleon would have chuckled at the absurdity of an enforcement agent of Mark’s caliber reacting that way if he himself didn’t find this place leaving his nerves on edge as well.
When they reached the rear of the main floor, the old hospital took on a different atmosphere. It was sparkling clean. The floors practically gleamed, there was a coat of fresh paint, light blue this time, and even the air was cleaner; it certainly smelled better.
Suddenly, they heard the squeaking pulleys and grinding, unoiled gears of an ancient elevator starting up from below.
Both edged carefully down the deserted corridor towards the source of the noise. Positioning themselves on either side of the doors as to not be seen, Mark and Napoleon waited to see at what floor the car would stop.
It ground to a halt on the main floor and once the lift doors opened, the single occupant, an unarmed man in a rumpled but clean T-shirt and denim overalls opened the gate and stepped out. He was in his mid-twenties, tall and thin, with reddish brown curly hair.
Both agents trained their weapons on the startled man. “And who might you be?” Solo asked quietly.
“Pl...Please don’t shoot me,” the man stammered, “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”
“Let us be the judge of that.” The CEA gave the man the once-over. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
“Please put that gun away, mister. I’m Zachary Jenks. You can call me Zack, everybody does. I was just gonna go outside for a smoke. Doc Rädsla, she don’t allow no smokin’ in the building. She says I gotta listen and do everythin’ she says or I’m out on my keister. Are you gonna put them guns away or not? I don’t like guns much.”
Mark frisked the man and found no weapons.
“Hey, stop that, mister. Yer tickling me,” Zack giggled.
Napoleon frowned at him. He knew this man’s last name from somewhere, but it eluded him for now. “What is Dr. Rädsla doing here? We need to find her.”
“Oh she’s sperimentin’. Maybe she’s done now. You guys gonna talk with her? She’s ain’t gonna like that. Nope, she’s ain’t gonna like that one bit. She likes her privacy.”
“Who else is here, Zack? Besides you and the doctor?”
“Oh. I know this! There’s them two dirty bird guards. They’s outside now, patrollin’. Oops! I’m not ‘sposed to call them ‘dirty birds.’ You won’t tell the doc, will ya? I’ll get into a mess o’trouble agin.”
“Dirty birds?” Mark asked, barely suppressing a chuckle, “Do you mean THRUSH?”
“Yup. That’s it. They’s got guns too, jus like you two, only they’s got rifles. I don’t like them rifles. What’s you plannin’ on doin’?”
“Is there anyone else here, Zack?” Mark continued.
“Yup. That Max fella. I don’t like him much neither. He hits me when I work too slow.”
“Anyone else?”
“Let me think. There’s doc and Max, them two guards and Oh yeah! That blond guy. Mister Curry-A-Kin.”
Zackary Jenks seemed pleased that he remembered all that had been asked of him. He smiled broadly at Mark and Napoleon; a wide, nearly toothless grin.
“Where are Dr. Rädsla, Max Cooper and Mr. Kuryakin?” Napoleon asked.
“Basement.”
“Let’s all go down there, shall we?”
Solo eyed the elevator. He didn’t want to announce their arrival with that loud, squeaking antique.
“Is there a stairway down to the basement, Zack?”
"Sure! Come on, I’ll show ya.” He hesitated and threw the agents a sideways glance.
“Hey now! Wait just a gosh-darn minute. Youse didn’t tell me your names.”
Solo was good at reading people and felt he could trust this man to tell him the truth. He seemed earnest when he answered their questions even if he wasn’t playing with a full deck.
“You can call me Mr. Solo and my friend’s name is Mr. Slate. Can you remember our names Mr. Jenks?”
Napoleon suddenly remembered where he’d heard the ‘Jenks’ name before. Captain Dennis Jenks ran a THRUSH school for boys along with Mother Fear in Switzerland. Illya and he had shut down the school last year. Captain Jenks was in prison and Mother Fear had been killed.
“Mister, you jus made me a happy man. Nobody’s ever called me ‘mister’ before.”
“Well now, I’m glad I made you happy. Are you a relative of Dennis Jenks? A brother, perhaps?” Napoleon asked.
Slate nodded at Solo knowingly. He had read the report on The Children’s Day Affair and was aware of the THRUSH school as well.
“No sir! I ain’t got no brother. I am his cousin sure ‘nuff though. I don’t never see him much. He lives in a place called Yer-up now. Doc Rädsla told me that.”
Before they reached the basement, Zack was instructed to not make any noise and to only speak at a whisper.
The basement was well lit and the three men made their way down a long corridor with Napoleon in the lead.
Zack stopped and pointed into one of the rooms. He remembered to whisper.
“This here’s where Mister Max pretended with that yeller haired man. See them tables and candles? They was play actin’ they was in one of them fancy I-talian eateries. It was jus’ take-out. I got to be the waiter. He paused and stood a little taller, reciting his lines. “Please be careful, gentlemen. Plates are very hot.”
Zack paused in the doorway of another, much smaller room. Solo peered in.
“What was going on in here?” Napoleon stepped inside. On a whim, he flipped on the light switch. Bright fluorescent ceiling fixtures illuminated the dreary room; he observed only a battered leather couch, a desk and an old desk chair.
“Um, that’s s’posed to be his office. Nuttin in there but old furniture I got at a second hand store. And that there room ‘cross the way, his bedroom.”
“Whose bedroom?” Mark asked just to clarify. “And what do you mean they were ‘play acting?’ ”
“That feller with the yeller hair,” Zach grinned. “Ceptin, he ain’t got no yeller hair no more. The next room’s the Doc’s office. I’s not posed to go in there.” Zack was pointing into yet another room.
Solo pressed for the answer to the second part of Mark’s question. “What do you mean they were play acting?”
“Play actin? You know, pretendin’ that them rooms was real places. The pretended they was in a fancy place to eat when it wasn’t and that bedroom was Curry-a-kin’s own bedroom back where he lives for real.”
“And this office was supposed to be his real office?”
“Yup! Back where he works at his uncle’s place.”
“Check out the Doctors office, Mark,” Solo ordered. “We’ll keep going. Photograph anything you think might be related to the experiment.”
“No problem, guv.”
As soon as Agent Slate entered the office, his eyes were riveted to a blackboard.
“May I be of some assistance?” A man’s sleepy voice came from behind Mark. He spun around to see a man in his fifties, dark hair, about Solo’s height and build, standing in the doorway clad in dark blue pajamas and slippers.
Angry at himself for being caught unawares, Mark barked out “Where’s Illya Kuryakin?”
With Mark’s gun in his face, Max Cooper quickly divulged Kuryakin’s location and what was happening to him at this very moment. Cooper was subsequently darted and left lying on the office floor.
Mark came flying down the hallway bellowing to Solo before catching up to him.
“We’ve got to hurry! Rädsla’s going to take a brain sample from Illya. They’re in the operating room now.”
“Son of a ...!” Solo hissed. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
He grabbed Zack with both hands. “Where’s the operating room?”
Zack tried to pull away, but Solo would have none of it.
“She made me scrub it clean this mornin’.”
“Where Zack? WHERE?” Napoleon demanded.
He pointed to the right. “It’s down the end of that there hallway.” Mark nodded.
Napoleon pulled Zack along before he was even finished talking. They turned the corner and started running towards the double swinging doors at the end.
A brain sample? What the hell has Illya gotten himself into this time? flashed through Napoleon’s mind as he released Zack and barreled down the corridor without him, at a pace that would have set a new speed record back at survival school.
Mark followed the two men ahead of him, giving them cover from any persons or guards who may heard the commotion and whom Zack may have forgotten to mention.
They heard a man’s scream.
The CEA was instantly on high alert, recognizing that that rather colorful Russian epithet had come from his partner.
Solo threw open the doors and ran into the makeshift operating room, noted Illya strapped down on a table, and saw the figure in green surgical garb, spattered in blood, pressing a drill into Kuryakin’s skull.
That was all Napoleon needed to see. He fired a bullet into Rädsla’s brain with a single shot, right between her eyes.
(Last chapter of Opens Arms will be posted tomorrow.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}