Dozens of heads snapped up in recognition of Mr. Coronado’s voice. We clamored from the room, each one of us eager to be the first to lay hands on him.
Once we had dragged Mr. Coronado to the Special Therapy room, we stripped him down to his boxers and undershirt. He wailed for mercy, but his pathetic sounds only emboldened us.
Judy commandeered his linen suit jacket and put it on over her hospital gown. She stood with arms akimbo and watched a group of men drag Mr. Coronado to the dentist’s chair.
Judy raised her hand. “Wait.”
“Wait?” said one of the men. “For what?”
“Have you forgotten? There are many others in this building we still need to free. We can deal with him later.”
The men lifted Mr. Coronado into the air and a battle cry went up. With Judy leading the way, we stampeded out into the hall, up the stairs, and onto the ground floor.
The Oasis staff were too stunned by the spectacle to resist or flee. The mob coursed through the halls and into the recreation center, where we doubled our number.
We paraded Mr. Coronado like a prize stag throughout the rest of the building. Once we had liberated the last of the residents on the second floor, we boiled and roared with such savagery that I half expected to hear tribal drums beating in our midst.
I forgot myself in that braying carnival of hate, lost my dignity to the bone-deep instinct for vengeance. To this day I’m haunted by the vivid memory of pulling Mr. Coronado’s hair and spitting in his face as we carried him spread-eagle down the corridor.
Triumphant, we thundered down the stairs and marched into the Special Therapy room like drunken homecoming soldiers. The men tossed Mr. Coronado into the dentist’s chair, strapped him in, and gagged him with a piece of linen torn from his pants.
A somber hush came over the room. The only sounds that remained were Mr. Coronado’s muted moans and the whimpers of the Oasis employees tied up in the hallway.
Judy stood at the foot of the dentist’s chair and all eyes went to her. She described to the residents from upstairs the horrors that had taken place in that chair, on Mr. Coronado’s watch.
The other Memory Center survivors corroborated her story, but still the people from upstairs refused to believe it. They needed proof of such outlandish claims.
Judy went to the door of the room that held the creature and beckoned me to her side. I joined her and took the riot helmet and police baton from the hooks on the wall.
Once I had put on the helmet, Judy unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door.
The thing scuffled in the darkness.
I clenched the baton in my hands. “Come out. We have another victim for you.”
It crept forward, slowly, wincing in the light. The crowd gasped and backed away.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It just wants to feed.”
“Stop.” A man approached me and Judy, grief twisting in his eyes. “We can’t do this. We can’t do to him what he did to us.”
Judy gave him a deadly stare. “The hell we can’t.”
“We drank the vials in the fridge, there’s no need to inflict—”
“There’s every reason to inflict. Coronado must be punished, and the only suitable punishment is to do to him what he did to us.”
“That makes us no better than him.”
“Oh, please.”
“What happened to you that you would so willingly do such a monstrous thing? Did that creature suck away your human dignity too?”
“No one’s keeping you here. You’re free to leave with your precious dignity intact, if that’s what matters most to you.” Judy pointed a cruel finger at Mr. Coronado. “The rest of us will have some of that.”
A handful of others muttered their agreement.
“We should at least put it to a vote,” said the man. “I… I can’t be the only one who’s profoundly disturbed by this.”
“Fine. All those in favor of doing to Coronado what he gladly did to us, and would have continued doing to us for as long as he could, until we were all dead, raise your hands.”
Most of the hands went up.
“Those not in favor?”
Only one other person raised her hand with the dissenter.
Judy looked at me. I kicked the ghoul and pointed my baton at Mr. Coronado.
It jumped on him without hesitation. I looked away.
Mr. Coronado shrieked through every second of the ordeal. Only once the ghoul had sucked the last drops of life from his body did he fall silent. We unclasped his desiccated body from the chair and it flopped to the floor.
I got a vial and made the creature spit out the substance, as I had seen it do before. The sludge’s disturbing warmth through the plastic turned my stomach, but still I craved it. There hadn’t been enough of the stuff in the refrigerator to fully restore my youth to what it had been when I first set foot in the Oasis.
The compulsion overcame me. I put the vial to my lips.
Judy snatched it away. “Excuse me. You think collecting that stuff automatically entitles you to drink it?”
I glared at her. “If it wasn’t for me, you would all still be milling around in the Memory Center, unable to remember your own names.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you mean. I’m the one who tripped the nurse and started the uprising, remember? You owe me your life.”
I curled my lip. “You have no idea, do you? Unlike any of you, I wasn’t even a retiree when I got here. I was a young reporter, here to do a story about this place.”
Judy threw back her head. “Ha!”
“They knocked me out when I discovered this room. I shouldn’t even be here.”
“None of us should be here. That’s the whole point.”
“Both of you be quiet.” A woman stepped between us. “Who appointed either of you to be in charge? We’re all equal here. We all get a say.”
Judy’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I know that trick. Pretend to be the fair-minded egalitarian. Flatter the crowd so you can take control instead.” She held up the vial and sneered. “Which of course means you ultimately end up being the one who gets to drink this, right?”
“I never said that.”
“But that’s what you were thinking.”
“Well, obviously someone’s got to drink it.”
“Exactly. And that person should be me, like I said. I’m the whole reason we got free, it’s as simple as that.”
“No,” a man shouted from the back of the crowd. “It should be me. The vial I got from the refrigerator barely had anything in it.”
“Give it to me,” said another. “I still can’t walk without a cane!”
Yet another, “I’m blind in my right eye!”
The room exploded in argument, everyone yelling at once. It escalated until I thought the quarreling might come to blows.
At the peak of the chaos, Judy climbed up on the dentist’s chair and raised her hands.
“Everyone quiet!”
The furor died down. They all looked up at her.
A cunning grin appeared on her face. “It just occurred to me, there’s no need to fight over one measly vial. After all…” She pointed toward the hall, where the Oasis employees sat tied up on the floor. “We can just make more.”
Everyone looked at each other, speechless. Not even the dissenter spoke.
The employees screeched like hogs as we dragged them in from the hall. We hardened our hearts to their cries. For years they had willingly done this to the weak and vulnerable, inflicting a form of torture beyond anything humanity had ever been able to devise on its own. The knowledge of this, the fresh sores of our own suffering, stiffened our mouths as we strapped the employees into the chair, one by one.
We sapped the last of them into oblivion and filled the final vial.
A grim quiet descended over the room. All eyes went to the creature. It sat hunched on the floor beside the dentist’s chair, arms curled around itself, rocking back and forth.
Without saying
a word, a man went to the wall where I had hung the police baton. He took the weapon and walked back to the ghoul, his stride brisk and stiff.
The creature looked up at him, suddenly alert to the threat, and raised its scrawny arms in front of its face. With both hands, the man swung the baton down like a woodsman’s axe, straight into the creature’s skull. The thing slumped over. With tears in his eyes, the man hit it again. And again. And again, cracking bone and splitting flesh in an accelerating torrent of rage until the abomination lay pulverized and ruined on the tile, expelled forever from this world.
We slid the corpses to the edges of the room. Shrunken to mummified husks, they felt like they weighed barely a hundred pounds each. I tried not to fixate on their hollowed cheeks, their loose pants slipping down from protruding hipbones, heads bent back as if drowning in an invisible sea.
We scoured the other rooms for nonmetal furniture, piled it all up around the dentist’s chair, and threw the cadavers onto the heap. To the summit of the grisly mound we dragged Mr. Coronado’s body, then stacked the creature’s body on top of his. A disturbing yet fitting display, their naked limbs intertwined and their faces pressed together in an endless, silent scream.
The maintenance shed behind the main building had more than enough cans of gas to completely drench the pyre. At first, no one volunteered to light it while the rest of us stood outside.
One man finally stepped forward. The dissenter. He went into the building and never came out.
We watched as smoke began to leak from the first-floor windows. Then came the glow of the flames, consuming the edifice from within.
I searched my heart for emotion and found only a cold, professional sense of lost opportunity. The journalist in me mourned the death of the story—the bodies, the creature, the records Mr. Coronado surely kept in his office, all crumbling to ash before me. Now I have only this unsubstantiated chronicle, this feckless admission of sins from a coward who has long since shed his former identity.
I looked away from the flames and noticed for the first time that dusk had descended. The darkness had crept up on us like an incubating sickness. All around me, dozens of faces stared as one into the growing fire, yellow and orange light dancing in hypnotized eyes.
Judy emerged from the crowd and turned to address us once more. Her voice broke the trancelike silence.
“I, like all of you, would love nothing more than to watch this place burn to the ground. But we can’t. The authorities will be here soon. No one can know what really happened here. No one can know what they did to us, or what we did to them.”
She put her hands up, silhouetted by the roaring column of flame behind her, as if blessing us with its power. “Treat this as a new life. A new beginning. We must wander from here as strangers, never to speak of it again.”
Without another word, we drifted away in separate directions across the manicured lawn. Behind us, the embers rose on black smoke into the twilight as the corpses of the damned burned in their collapsing tomb. Yet the evil had made it out alive. It escaped with us, close as shadow, carried in our blood and woven into our bones.
MORE BY CHRIS W. MARTINEZ
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The Oasis Page 3
