At her feet, on the old rug, was Tio Sesar. Her heart sank. He must have slipped on his way to the restroom and now he reached up to her. God forgive her, how could she have let this happen? And he was filthy. She was ashamed at the dirt that clung to him. This was no way for her dear uncle to live; no way for him to spend his last days. She rushed to him and lifted him up, trying to brush the dirt from his pajamas.
"How did this happen, Tio? You have to be careful! Just call me if you need something. Lo siento! Lo siento. Lo siento . . . "
His eyes were still so kind. Brown rimmed with gold, they filled her with a soothing warmth. He always had a smile for the nieces and nephews. She brushed the lock of gray hair out of his eyes and looked at that smile. There was a safety there she never felt with her father or mother, or her grandparents. When she was afraid, she came to Tio. When she was sad, Tio cheered her up with a story from when he was a child in Mexico. And now, even as he hurt, he looked up at her and wordlessly, she was made still. That smile. Even in his seventies, his teeth gleamed.
Tio’s lips curled into a snarl. Something was hurting him. Her Tio! She followed his angry gaze to the chain that hung around her neck and was disgusted.
A dead rat! Strangled by the silver chain! Where had she gotten such a thing? It was a diseased thing, a sick thing. One of the cousins must have put it on her. Those disrespectful troublemakers. She snatched the foul thing off of her neck and cast it out of sight.
And Tio smiled at her again. It was all she ever wanted. His beautiful eyes shined up at her and that smile was like the sun in spring.
Something buried scratched at the surface.
Didn't Tio Sesar have false -
The boy. She turned to look back at the boy, who just stood in the hallway, shirking his responsibilities, as usual.
"Get in here and help your uncle. You have no respect for your elders."
He just shook his head. She gasped. "How can you act like that? You need to show respect for your elders and not be some hoodlum who doesn't help them. They've done so much for you."
The boy just stared back at her. His eyes were wide and white and he was saying something, but he'd never learned to speak up. He was a mumbler and when he did speak up, it was just to sass someone anyway. It was fine. She could do it herself.
Tio Sesar's warm lips pressed to the back of her hand. His grip was so weak and sadness welled within her, but even now he was trying to make her feel like a princess. He'd talk to her like she was royalty. He'd scrape and bow when she wore her mother's dresses. His little princesa. He pressed his lips to the back of her hand, smiling and kissing. He turned over her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist.
Her Tio. Her protector.
***
Rudy couldn't make his body work. His legs were weak and useless. His voice was lost somewhere in a dark corner of his chest. Only hoarse breaths came out when he tried to move his lips. Nurse Otero dragged a corpse out of the crate the agent had brought. The stink hit him the second she opened the box. Clumps of dark, moist earth fell to the white linoleum in the room. The emergency lights cast an unreal glow over all of it. She looked like a gravedigger. She hunched over and pulled the body gently from the soil. The old crucifixes clattered to the floor and she cradled it. Otero spoke to it sweetly, saying Tio, Tio and her voice was not her own. It wasn't the clipped, authoritative tones of the hospital's head nurse. This was a little girl. It was a little girl with a lilt as light as a caress. She touched its face. She brushed off the dirt and plucked the worms from the blackened skin and everything inside of Rudy just washed away with an empty chill. He knew he should get someone. He should tell Bullet or Dr. Hank. He should run and tell them that Nurse Otero had gone crazy. His cousin, Hector, had told him about this. There was a boy at school whose dad was in Afghanistan and when he came back he was some angry, pissed off zombie. He would drink and stare off into nothing. And then one day he drank a bottle of tequila, took a bunch of pills, and blew his brains out in the middle of the street. No one talked about it, but everyone whispered about it. Hector told him the kid's dad had seen too much. His brain couldn't handle it. It was post trauma disorder or something. Being in the war had just broken the guy, fucked him up forever. Now that's what happened to Nurse Otero. With the gunshots and screaming and his mother -
He shook it off. He couldn't think about it. They wouldn't tell him what happened. He knew his mom was dead. Those bikers killed her, but he didn't know how. He didn’t see it. He didn't think he had, anyway. Maybe he had and just blocked it out. Maybe everything was fine. Maybe he was actually sleeping, still on the floor in the ER or even in his bed at home.
Or maybe he was the crazy one. He was the one with post trauma disorder. Everything that was happening was too much for him. He wasn't a pussy, but he was just a kid. And sometimes people's minds weren't built to take that much weight, especially not a kid's. But that bitch nurse was baby-talking a dead body. God, they'd lock him away forever if he told anyone about this. On Monday, back at school, if he wasn't already in the mental hospital, he'd just tell them -
The body moved. For a second, some defense mechanism in his brain tried to tell him it was his imagination or that Nurse Otero had moved the body herself, but no. He saw it. He saw Otero throw away her cross and let the fingers wrap around her arm. It was moving. The corpse was trembling. It took her hand and brought it in close. The lips moved like the worms that crawled through its flesh. Rudy pissed himself. He felt the warmth leave his bladder and stain his pants, but he didn't care. He couldn't care.
The thing held Nurse Otero's hand to its lips. Its mouth opened. The teeth were the teeth of an animal, of a demon. Nurse Otero pressed her wrist up to those teeth and it bit her. It bit into the skin and blood sprayed onto the rags that wrapped the body. Some spattered on the floor among the dirt and old crosses. Its other arm reached up and held tight. The hands, just bones covered with a paper-thin sheet of decaying skin, clutched at her forearm. It nursed at the blood that flowed and Otero whispered sweetly to it. She cooed. Something squirmed from the back of the thing’s mouth and Rudy thought it was more worms but it was not worms it was a tongue a black tongue that lapped and drank eagerly and the eye socket bubbled with milky white fluid and took shape into something gray and smoky that looked at him as the mouth drank and the face pulled away and smiled. The thing slowly, tenderly moved up to Otero’s neck.
Rudy ran.
***
It wouldn't be long now. Sawed Off pulled at his restraints. He was still too weak and God damn his head hurt. His leg, too. He looked down at the toes and saw that they were all mostly there now. Mostly. The leg still looked like a runt. Pale, pink and hairless. Still too skinny. He'd get there. He giggled. These mother fuckers didn't even know. They thought they knew, but they didn't. Gideon and the boys were gonna march in here and wreck shit. They were going to turn this place into a damned playground of blood and brains. He just hoped they'd let him out first.
They sure were taking their sweet time. He was getting bored. They'd been inside. He heard them in the ER, but it sounded like the doctor folks had put up some kind of fight. That was funny. He wasn't expecting this kind of fun. He bet Gideon wasn't either. So hell, why not make it last? But still . . . did they have to leave him in here the whole time? He imagined the rest of them were out there smokin' dope and fuckin', but not him. Nope. Ol' Sawed Off had to sit here in this damned bed and wait. But it wouldn't be long now. No, sir. All them fancy doctor types were in for a good old time. Yeah, boy.
Sawed Off howled. He kicked. He couldn't help it. Tonight was going to be fun. Tonight was perfect. He just hoped he wasn't missing out on all of the good stuff. Even from his bed, he could hear the screams. He could smell the cooking skin. It was that damned trailer park. That kind of pissed him off, no lie. Gideon promised he'd get to tear up the trailer park. It was his idea, anyway. Still, he hadn't planned on getting his brains blasted out by that fat fucking hillbilly. Oh, he couldn't w
ait to get out. He could still smell the fucker. He smelled like sweat and whiskey. It was gonna be good.
The old Mexican nurse appeared in the doorway. Sawed Off stopped laughing. The lady was dead-eyed, staring at him, through him. Her hair was all mussed and blood dribbled down her neck and onto her clothes. She was pushing a wheelchair. In it was an old man, maybe the oldest man he'd ever seen. He smiled at Sawed Off as their eyes met.
"Oh no. Oh no no," Sawed Off heard himself say as he pulled again at his restraints. He looked up at the nurse lady as she pushed the old man into his room and closed the door behind them. "Oh, you dumb fuckers. Y'all don't even know what y'all did."
The nurse rolled the old man up to his bed. Sawed Off started to scream.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hank finished wrapping the bandage on Bullet's shoulder when he heard the scream. He and Whitey looked towards the West Wing. "Oh, what now?"
Bullet didn't react. She'd been checked out the entire time he cleaned her gunshot wound, shot her up with antibiotics, and wrapped it. The only time she even flinched is when he delicately took Nathan’s cross out of her clenched fist. The bullet went straight through. She'd be fine, but sporting a tough scar on her shoulder. Now she just sat on the edge of the bed in the ER while Whitey watched Hank work on her.
The scream was just the crazy asshole. Through all of the gunshots and horror, he'd never stopped his jabbering. Until now. After the scream, he was quiet and Hank felt the difference. Whitey lowered the gun in the direction of the intersection where the lobby, East and West Wing, and ER all met at the nurse's station.
"Where's Otero?" Whitey asked. "And the kid?"
Otero wandered out from the West Wing. Even from across the ER, Hank could tell something was wrong. She was shuffling. Each step was short and slow. She was disheveled. And there was blood. She collapsed and fell face first into the pile of shattered drywall Rudy had been sweeping. Hank ran to her, but stopped halfway across the emergency room.
Something else was coming. He could hear the squeaks of an old wheelchair around the corner. It appeared out of the West Wing, an elderly man - ancient, really - struggling to navigate the chair over the battlefield of chipped marble and debris. Even as a feeble silhouette, Hank felt his stomach curdle looking at the man. In the shadows, they could see the lines in his face. The hair was gray and stringy, hanging over cheeks sharp enough to cut glass; the hands little more than withered claws. The dim lights colored him a shade of sickly green. Slowly, agonizingly, he rolled towards them, but each push at the wheels was more assured. He began to glide. As he did, it seemed that his skin became fuller; his eyes, brighter. It must have been a trick of the light, but his hair was black as pitch now. It covered the spots on his head where Hank thought he had seen bald patches. The man was still shrouded in shadow. Hank strained to get a better look, even as he felt himself slowly stepping backward, but the shadows seemed to cling to the man. And then he stood. He rose from the wheelchair and they heard his joints pop like rifle shots. Hank again stepped back. Whitey did the same.
The man looked around the room. No matter how he held his head, Hank couldn't get a look at his face anymore. The shadows seemed to spill from him like an overflowing glass. And he carried a sound with him that was not a sound. It was something Hank could feel in his nerves, something that whined at the base of his skull, just outside of perception. The sweat along Hank's back was a thousand cold needles.
"Where am I?" The voice was deep and cracked, almost wholly inhuman. Half of it sounded like something hideous and horrible trying to mimic a human. The other half vibrated like some ancient machine deep within the earth. It came from everywhere and nowhere. Hank bit his lip to keep from trembling.
"Oh Jesus. Shit." Whitey said under his breath.
The man stared straight at Hank and through the shadows that obscured his face there were two far away points that gleamed, almost illuminated. "What year is it?"
Hank looked away from the eyes, afraid that he would fall into them and be devoured. He stuttered as he spoke. "2015."
The man nodded slowly. Hank looked around for the agent, but Castle had disappeared. He was no longer hiding in his corner. He'd run and now Hank couldn't blame him. Bullet still sat on the edge of the bed, motionless. Her face was alive now, chiseled with fear. The whites of her eyes glowed. Her fingers trembled, crinkling the paper sheet that protected the bed. She didn't turn to look at the man.
The man seemed to take a deep breath, as if inhaling the entire room. He stepped forward now and his gait loosened. He became confident, looking less like a skeleton and more like something close to a man. Whitey and Hank stepped aside to let him pass. He walked towards the shuttered ER door and paused. A few shafts of light poked through the bullet holes in the metal and cut through the dimness of the room. The man stopped and stared at those, almost examining them. He held a hand up in the direction of the noise outside and his head rolled back. The cacophony outside withered. The engines stopped roaring as the riders rolled their bikes to a stop. The jubilant howls, the gunshots, all of it grew silent. They couldn't see him, but somehow, he had their attention.
Whitey raised the shotgun. The barrel shook in his hands. He pulled the hammers back and rested the butt against his shoulder. The man tilted his head, ever so slightly, in their direction. Hank reached out, put a hand on the barrel of the gun, lowering it.
"Doc?" Whitey asked.
Hank only shook his head. The man snapped out of his reverie and moved towards them. His footsteps were light and graceful now, hypnotic. His hair, black and filthy. It hanged over his shadowed face in oily clumps.
"Who are you?" Hank asked.
Again, the man tilted his head. It was a quizzical look. A gravelly noise that may have been a chuckle came from his throat. "Varney. Call me Varney, I suppose. And you - "
Sunlight erupted into the room. The storm door was thrown open with a metallic screech. Whitey stumbled back. The wall of light hit Varney. He threw his hands up to shield his face. The very air in the room sizzled. Boom! Varney screamed and was thrown back across the room by the hammer of light. He hit the wall and squirmed against it, pinned in place. His features twisted beneath the skin. Serpentine muscles knotted and his jaw distended to show row upon row of serrated teeth.
Varney’s screams were a chorus of bile and agony that Hank felt it in the deepest part of his chest. Vomit surged in Hank's throat as he covered his ears and doubled over. The unearthly wail of a feral animal from another planet. It made Hank want to sob, to tear his eyes out, to obliterate himself out of fear and misery.
It stopped. With a thoom! the room was dark again. The shift made the darkness so complete that Hank thought he had died, that the scream had dragged them all to the lowest pit in hell and the world had folded in on itself after them. A dim light at the end of a tunnel. The red glow of the exit sign above the ER storm door. Shafts of light, like starlight, leaking through the bullet holes. Hank looked at it and couldn't decide if it was real or not. Agent Castle stood beneath it, his hand still on the lock after sliding it back into place. He had flooded the room. He had opened the door and put them all at risk. Outside, the Goats began to yell again. It was bloody, visceral jubilation.
Hank said to him, "What the hell did you - "
But Castle wasn't listening. He sprinted across the emergency room. His eyes, tired and bloodshot before, were now full of a berserk energy. He screamed and rushed towards Varney, who now writhed against the back wall. The shadowed man's flesh smoked. His limbs, now flaccid and gray, moved like slugs cooking on a hot sidewalk. The agent's nine-millimeter rang out. He shot as he ran, sending shudders through Varney's body. Castle crossed the room in no time and grabbed Varney by the throat. Varney's eyes widened, exposing them as glistening black spheres in a misshapen skull. They were alien in their size and rolled wildly in the sockets.
Castle showed the strength of a man possessed with terror. He dragged Varney across the floor and threw o
pen the door to Otero's office. With a growl, he hurled the creature into the room and slammed the door shut. Pushing against it, he screamed, "I need the keys!"
Hank didn't move. No one did.
"I need a knife. A scalpel. Something!"
Hank stood, but was trying to process it all. At Castle’s feet, a dazed Otero raised her head. She moaned and tried to lift herself up. Bits of plaster trash clung to her face. “Tio?”
Hank started to move to her, to help her up, but Castle yelled again.
"Knife, God damn it! Get me a knife!”
"Ummm. . . " Hank looked around.
"Now!"
The scalpel on the table for Bullet's wound. Hank ran, grabbed it, and rushed back to Castle. The agent snatched it out of his hand and began to carve lines into the thick oak door. On the other side, something squealed. Varney. A hateful, wounded sound. Hank watched as Castle worked thin details into the wood. Random circles. Meticulous lines. Triangles. Symbols that looked like Hebrew or Arabic. As Castle carved, the squealing became a hiss and the hiss became a growl. Hank stepped away from the door. Castle worked faster.
"What are you doing?" Hank asked.
"Buying us time."
He cut the final notch and what was left on the door was the symbol from the inside of the crate. Just as Castle stepped away, the door shook in its frame. Varney slammed against it. Again, he growled. There were traces of humanity in there, but they mingled with the other. After just a second, he stopped and grew silent. A still shroud fell over the ER.
"I don't understand," Hank said.
Castle dropped the scalpel. It clattered to the floor next to Otero as she pushed herself up on her hands. She was pale. Blood coagulated on her wrist and neck and down the front of her clothes. Bits of white powder from the drywall stuck to her face and hair.
The Black Goat Motorcycle Club Page 10
