Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Metatron drags him through, around the corner, onto a group of geriatrics, bent with age. They turn as one—wizened old faces, the Dark Crystal211 muppets without their costumes—then slowly back to what they’re encircling: the old man, spilled from his wheelchair but still alive, his midsection opened up, him trying to see it himself.

  Con starts breathing harder, fumbles on the wall for the in-house phone, ad-libs into it about getting someone to the 4B corridor, and then parts the crowd professionally—something we’ve yet to see from him—tries to render some sort of frantic aid to the old man, who’s pointing weakly at the ceiling.

  “It just dropped on him,” an OLD WOMAN says.

  “Like a spider,” an even OLDER MAN adds.

  “I told you they had bugs here,” the OLDEST MAN OF ALL says, backing his wheelchair into his room, locking the door behind him.

  Con is to the point of aid where he’s going to get his hands bloody; he runs through his pockets for something, asks Metatron—“Latex … gloves?”—but Metatron just shrugs, still trying to make sense of this all.

  “Fuck it, then,” Con says, and helps the old man anyway, the geriatrics ad-libbing about the quality of care, the price of exterminators, how it used to be, etc.

  Finally Metatron steps between, resuming control. “Go back to your rooms,” he says, voice level, and when no one moves he tells them “now” in no uncertain terms.

  Soon enough it’s him and Con. He leans to his shoulder, the mic, asks the question for us: “Where is it?”

  BUT Rush in the security room has no idea, has all the cameras working double-time, the coma patient not in any of them at the moment.

  THE elevator doors open again on 4A/B, only this time the shot’s from the other side: various paramedics spill out, zero in on the old man. Con is pushed out of the way, backs off holding his bloody hands high, as if he’ll just have nothing to do with it, then.

  “You’re welcome?” he says to them all when they don’t thank him.

  Rush’s voice comes through Metatron’s shoulder: “Down,” he says, loud enough for Con to hear. “It was going down, I think.” Con locks eyes with Metatron.

  Metatron nods. “Basement,” he says. “Then we’ll work our way back up.”

  “Are you the only one here?” Con asks Metatron, and Metatron nods, explains: “Christmas Eve … told them I could handle it. [beat, beat; formally, to Con:] Consider yourself deputized.”

  They walk out of the shot, leaving the various paramedics swarming over the old man.

  “I don’t think it was trying to kill him, really,” ONE says.

  “Well then what?” ANOTHER says, no answer, and we go closer than necessary on the old man’s wound, back off of Hale’s similar wound, Markum with both (gloved) hands in.

  “There’s nothing really missing here,” he tells Nona, surprised. “I don’t know. It’s like it was all just in the way.”

  “Of what?”

  “What bit him?”

  “In the way of what?”

  “Look at this,” Markum says, shining a penlight into Hale’s still-opened gut, spotlighting the tangle of undifferentiated organs we’d expect from a high school biology lab.

  “What is it?” Nona asks, worry there in her voice.

  Markum smiles. “Used to be his stomach,” he says.

  “‘Used to be’?”

  “Now it’s … two stomachs,” Markum says, “as in cut in half, opened up. And look at this.” He shines the flashlight over the other organs, which are blackened, retracting. “Digestion,” he explains. “Fifteen minutes after death, the enzymes in your stomach begin eating you from the inside—”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “Yeah, well,” Markum says, directing Nona down to the digestion already going on. “I’m no microsurgeon here, y’know … ”

  “You said the … rest of him. It was in the way. Of what?”

  “Of his stomach contents, I’d guess.”

  Nona rubs her left temple.

  “Why … ” Nona starts, then starts again: “Why do that?”

  “Well, what did this to him, first. Quid pro quo, Agent Starling.”212

  Nona’s boxcutter opening and closing with impatience becomes important. But she keeps it in check, in her pocket. “A fellow patient,” she finally says.

  “And what about this ‘patient’ made him want to … [indicating Hale, again]?”

  “He’d lost eighty-five pounds since Halloween.”

  “… and woke up with the munchies?” Markum adds, already not believing it. Getting Nona to hold Hale’s midsection together with forceps as he sews two flaps together. He talks about Hale as he works: “Without proper care he won’t make it. This is temporary. Field medicine. Civil War stuff. I’ll deny it, of cour—”

  He’s interrupted by Hale, spasming, convulsing.

  “I told you he better not di—” Nona starts, Markum already in denial mode: “It’s not me,” he says, fighting Hale. “Chart says he’s ten hours late already for his phenobarb. This is withdrawal. Whether he’s comatose or not. You don’t have to be conscious to seize.”

  Nona makes a show of forcing herself patient. “Why go for the stomach contents?” she repeats, the shot settling on Hale’s wound, their voices floating above it.

  “Because it makes sense,” Markum says. “Why burn calories digesting when you can get it predigested? Like with baby birds. If this patient did in fact lose all that mass—which I seriously doubt—then he’s looking to put it back on as efficiently as possible.”

  “And then some,” Nona adds. “And when he gets back to weight?”

  Markum doesn’t blink, smiles: “I imagine his eating habits would be quite refined, by then … the lion goes for the throat, the leopard for the skull. You know how the hyena kills her prey, though?”

  Nona just stands there, waiting.

  “By eating it,” Markum answers. “Until there’s not enough left to sustain life … ”

  Nona holds the forceps and watches the ceiling, eventually gets crosscut with a wholly different place, now: dank, dark, low light level, concrete walls, chain link around a small power center, gate open. Muted sounds of heavy machinery. The basement. In answer to Markum’s stomach contents line of talk the est. shot pans over to a motherlode of vending-machine backstock arranged in crumbling aisles—all the candy and crackers the hospital could ever need.

  Somewhere a wrapper tears, something is crunched into, and then in the opposite direction a door opens, Metatron pushing through, flashlight in hand, Con a few moments behind.

  “Shit,” Con’s saying appreciatively, “Broomhilda always told me she’d put me in the dungeon, but I thought she was just being figurative … ”

  “Keep your eyes open,” Metatron instructs.

  “And my insides closed,” Con adds to himself, taking stock of the basement: “… like a candy store,” he says, Metatron correcting: “Heart and brains,” directing the flashlight at various junction boxes. “Electricity and phones … backup generators … ”

  “Yeah,” Con says sarcastically, eyeing the gang graffiti tagged on the walls, “and practically impossible to get to. Veritable fortress of solitude213 you got here … ”

  Another candy wrapper tears and Metatron’s flashlight swings over, down one of the many aisles of supplies.

  “Clean up, aisle five,” Con says nervously, quietly, already backing off.

  VANGELESTI doing the opposite in the coma unit: stepping lightly forward, two of the gutted coma patients writhing on their beds, the rest bled out.

  He’s not interested in them though, but the drain-patient’s old bed—the sheet-covered figure, clearly female.

  When he gets there he says it—“Cat?”—then can’t quite pull the sheet back yet, has to make do with fishing a hand out the side, searching for an engagement ring. Which isn’t there. Just black nails, absolutely perfect. Vangelesti sighs, pulls the sheet back with more confidence, revealing Lin, grotesq
uely dead, flayed open, staring eyes.

  Vangelesti crosses himself instinctively, no confidence at all now, doesn’t see the PATIENT two beds down, her eyelids retracting, yellow eyes becoming aware.

  “FUCKING rats,” Metatron says, advancing down the noisy aisle.

  “Maybe we should just call—” Con starts, is cut short by Metatron holding his hand up like this is a military operation. Still advancing. As they round the corner there is the token rat, but it’s dead, butterflied, whiskers still twitching.

  Metatron palms his Taser, looks back to Con.

  Con shakes his head no, no, but Metatron advances, rounds the corner, disappears.

  “We shouldn’t split up,” Con whispers after Metatron, then turns around fast, his POV trying to catch the scuttling directly above. But it’s dark up there. Trying not to look away from the ceiling he starts backing out of the maze of candy aisles, getting instantly lost and twice as frantic, stepping once on a stray bag of peanuts, popping it, Metatron spinning to the noise a few aisles over, nothing.

  But then the coma patient drops silently down on him, falling slowly as if using air resistance to hush his descent. Metatron whirls, swinging a wide backhand, and the coma-patient is light enough that it throws him through a wall of candy.

  Metatron looks at his arm in wonder, wades into the pile, nothing there but candy.

  His neck is bleeding now.

  He collects the blood on his hand, studies it, smells it. Looks up, flashlighting the ceiling finally, the patient never wholly in the beam, just an unpredictable hissing from the darkness, slit-eyes flashing.

  “What in the living hell …?” Metatron says.

  “Exactly,” Con says, suddenly there. He looks up with Metatron. Not quite at the ceiling, but higher: “Virginia,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “She was right.” He turns to Metatron, says, “We’ve got to get out of this place.”

  Metatron smiles, nods with some suicidal, internal rhythm, finishes Con’s line with “… if it’s the last thing we ever do … ”214

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, man,” Con whispers, hard.

  “Not yet,” Metatron says, rubbing his hurt neck, pointing up with his chin. “Nut doesn’t weigh a buck-oh-five,215 y’know.”

  “He’s not just some psych patient who thinks he’s Spider-Man,” Con says.

  As if in response, the hissing stops, and Metatron can no longer locate the coma patient with the light. He and Con spin to every sound, the most telltale of which is the chain-link clattering.

  Metatron steps forward, toward the seductively moving gate. Deliberates, decides: “I’ve got to go stop it,” he says. “It can’t get up to the main floors again.”

  “No,” Con says, “that’s what they always say. You don’t even know what—”

  “And you do?”

  Con doesn’t have any answer.

  Metatron smiles, takes his jacket off, folds it over a shelf. Lights a final joint, offering some to Con, who declines. “Just like ’Nam,” Metatron says finally, studying the joint, exhaling, “but without the damn defoliant,”216 and then he’s inside the chain-link enclosure, pulling the gate to behind him, a pay-per-view217 deathmatch in the making, Con shaking his head no. Backing away, taking the jacket with him.

  But he has to watch too: the coma patient drops on Metatron again, and this time hangs on when Metatron tries to fling him away. The close-up of the Taser goes sliding across the concrete, nestling up against the chain-link. In a wider shot, Metatron is going at the coma patient open-fisted, some homemade martial arts stuff, the coma patient’s collarbone audibly giving, the skin tearing away like rice paper. Not that that slows him down; he keeps coming, Metatron screaming in anger and in pain, the patient finally locking onto Metatron’s face with his teeth while his feet claw Metatron’s torso open somehow.

  “No,” Con says.

  With Metatron not even dead yet, the impatient patient lowers his face to the opened gut, eating him dead like Markum was talking about. Metatron reaches for Con, for help, but Con is still shaking his head no. The Taser’s not a foot past Metatron’s outstretched hand, too—the nearness emphasizing how little Con would have to do here.

  “I’m no fucking hero, man,” he says to Metatron, for himself, “sorry,” backing his way to the door, out, closing it behind him. The door locks loudly, with finality.

  The patient, through with Metatron now, climbs up onto the fence, trying to reach through for candy. Below him, Metatron is inching his mostly dead self to the close-up of the Taser.

  After some drawn-out long-finger shots, he has it.

  The coma patient hears, looks down at Metatron smiling up, and then the Taser electrifies the fence, arcing the coma patient back into the many junction boxes, shorting them all out in a shower of sparks and noise. It cooks him, his yellow-eyed head bulging Scanners218-style, then popping wetly onto the backside of the screen.

  FROM a high ext. angle with the stone gargoyle in the f.g.—the lens still humid—the lights of the hospital cascade out, from the bottom up, as if from the basement.

  INT., it’s the expected madhouse montage,219 in sequence: Con finding himself midfloor in an elevator, the security jacket already on, his hand on the radio button, mouth lowered to it; Rush in the security room, the monitors blipping off then coming back on weakly, backup kicking in; Vangelesti performing something like last rites over one of the dead coma patients, stopping to look up at the missing light; Dr. Watkins on his knees in a pool of amber emergency light with organs all around him, the close-up of the beeper by his leg glowing 666, bad news; Nona and Markum in ER, Markum midstitch, Nona shaking her head no, no, the forceps suddenly, irretrievably disappearing in her POV; various ICU patients going into distress; the diesel generators in the basement coughing awake, rocking in place, Metatron just a slow pan away, undeniably dead—cooked with the coma patient; the swishing EXIT doors locking down, patients pressing desperately against them, until they crash out; etc.

  Last is Virginia, still on Rush’s bed. The laptop battery-driven apparently, the cursor still waiting for her. She looks around. And then night fell on the savannah, she types, but hitting Return only gets her a DISCONNECTED error. She calmly reaches over to the nightstand, for the phone. It doesn’t have a dial tone.

  IN another darkness is the sound of creaking wheels, someone moving in the darkness.

  “Don’t worry,” Sandro says—evidently the source of noise here, “I know where the flashlight is. Every room has one.”

  In a thermal-enhanced POV though, he’s just talking big, fumbling through the desk, on the shelves, etc. Still talking: “… this happens all the time on TV. They have backup power … my dad used to work for the electric company and he—” cutting himself short, to the closet now.

  He opens it, his haloed hand touching the flashlight twice before realizing what it is. And even then, he drops it, has to grope in what, to him, is darkness, but in the enhanced POV is hanging clothes, a body behind them. Cat, a nondistinct grey, meaning dead. In case we doubt it though, the angle of her neck is something of a giveaway. And the way she’s sucked dry, cheeks and ribs caved in.

  Sandro touches along her face. “What …?” he says, drawing back, finally locating the flashlight, turning the beam on Cat.

  He reels back—wheels back—Cat unaccountably falling out on him.

  He’s not screaming either, but hyperventilating.

  In the beam of his flashlight is Jenny, just standing there, no wheelchair, coldly regarding him. The owner of the POV, obviously.

  “What—” Sandro stutters, “what are you?”

  We draw in tight on Jenny’s lips for the answer—“I don’t know”—then the shot dollies around behind her, the tie of her hospital gown carelessly undone, twin black wing buds blistered to the surface.

  Close-up, her index finger lengthens as far as her skin will allow, and then a sharp black demon-looking claw pushes through. Sam Neill’s velociraptor claws,220 more
or less.

  Sandro swallows, breathes too much too fast, and wheels out of the room, hits the hall leaning forward for all he’s worth. Rolling, rolling, his racing wheelchair putting some serious distance between him and his room. Behind him, the thermal-enhanced POV steps out—Jenny—and coolly watches him try to escape.

  After giving him what feels like too much of a headstart, she steps forward in pursuit, building to a run T-1000221 style: lips thin, all that hard breathing not really necessary.

  IN an emergency-lit hall, elevator doors are slowly pried open.222 Fingers appear at floor level, become Con, crawling out.

  He stands, flattens himself against the wall as Sandro blasts past, out of one darkness and into the next.

  Double doors open and Jenny presents herself, begins running after Sandro.

  As she passes Con he grabs her by the scruff of her gown, lifts her, smiles to her but she doesn’t even acknowledge him, is all about Sandro, retreating down the hall.

  Aside from this, two other things become important with Jenny as Con holds her: 1) the crude string tied around her neck, threaded through Cat’s engagement ring, Con almost making the connection there, and 2) her legs, fully functional.

  “Therapy must be going well for you … ” Con says, and she quits kicking. He sets her down. From a level angle behind them her hand is balled into a fist, the lone claw too long to fit, running up her wrist instead.

  She flexes it.

  “He told me to tell you he was sorry,” Con says, nodding in the direction Sandro took.

  “Who are you?” Jenny asks.

  Con looks down at his jacket, his motocross boots, etc. “Security,” he says. “Now get back to your room. Santa Claus won’t come if you’re not asleep.”

  With that he walks off in Jenny’s enhanced POV, his hat still on.