Chapter 2
There wasn't much Detective Jonathan Goodwell could do but turn Kimberly on her side and call for help. He held her hand while paramedics took her blood pressure and strapped her to a gurney, and rode with her in the back of the ambulance to St Jeremiah's hospital.
She woke halfway through the trip and started screaming when she realised she was restrained. The paramedics administered a cocktail of sedatives with names Goodwell didn't recognise, and she soon quieted.
If she'd been awake he would've asked her about New York, about her dream fiancé and the cat and all her other half-truths, but the matter was out of his hands. All he could do was follow Mrs Archer to the second floor of the hospital, where they transferred her between beds and once again tightened leather straps around her wrists and ankles. After that, a nurse ushered Goodwell back down past reception. "She'll be well cared for," the nurse assured, clipboard in hand. "We'll call when she's in a fit state to talk."
Goodwell hunched. Every time the front doors opened a chill wind blew into reception, cutting through his thin suit jacket all the way to the bone. "Can you tell me anything about her medications?"
The nurse frowned. "Excuse me?"
"Her treatments, her sedatives," Goodwell repeated. "How will you be-"
"I can't share that information, Detective."
Goodwell scowled. "I can talk to Doctor Keller."
"Go, then. Talk. You're not getting me fired." The nurse tucked his clipboard beneath his arm and shooed Goodwell out the doors. "Good night, good night, good night!"
Goodwell was left standing in the evening rain. He flipped his collar up, hugging himself against the cold. Was it that time already? It seemed only hours before he'd been interviewing Mrs Archer, and now the sun had already set, casting long shadows across the hospital grounds.
He shivered, but not because of the cold. There was something in the air at St Jeremiah's that made his skin itch, and Goodwell had seen things that would turn most men's stomachs. Maybe it was the constant spray of antiseptic that made him feel so light-headed. Or maybe something darker.
One day, he thought, he'd have to kick down some doors in St Jeremiah's, just to see how far the rot had spread. For now, he had a report to file.
The rain was easing by the time he reached his house: a little white-washed bungalow, the roof missing too many tiles and the ornamental fountain in the front garden overflowing. Hannah was in the kitchen, bent over the sink, elbow deep in a cast iron pot, suds boiling up over her rubber gloves. Goodwell knocked on the doorframe as he passed, and Hannah grunted a reply without looking up.
It was enough. He took the basement key from the hook beside the coat rack and turned it three times in the lock, twice left, once right. He rested his forehead against the cool wood and whispered. There was a slithering sound from behind the door. The locks thudded back.
He secured the door behind him and lit the candle he always carried in his coat pocket. The candle was six inches long, and despite the fact that he burned it almost every night it never seemed to grow any shorter. That was the nice thing about Rustwood, he thought. Sometimes things just worked and it was better not to ask why.
Candle in hand, he descended into the dark.
The basement was five paces by six, empty apart from a boiler in one corner, a vacuum cleaner in the other and a table covered with a sheet in the precise centre. Goodwell plugged in the vacuum and cleaned the dust out of the corners before tugging the sheet away. The shrine was simple: a porcelain bowl, a teacup on either side, and a kitchen cloth for mopping up the spare blood.
The candles Goodwell set in the teacups were special. He'd made them himself, infusing the beeswax with spit, incense and saltwater collected from the Rustwood shore. They, like the candle in his hand, bled wax but never got any shorter. Another small mercy; every minute he spent by the sea felt like ten hours off his life. The things he'd seen there, skittering in the coastal caves...
With the candles all guttering, Goodwell rolled up his left sleeve. The skin around his elbow was a mass of scars, and it took a while to find a patch of flesh that would accept the blade of his knife. Blood welled in the crease, and he let it drip into the porcelain bowl until it was as deep as the first joint of his little finger.
He waited.
The candleflame swooped, bent almost horizontal. The blood in the bowl bubbled and hissed. The voice came to him from behind his right shoulder, as if someone had slipped into the room without his noticing. "She is alive?"
Goodwell swallowed hard. The voice was neither male nor female, not truly deep or high pitched or frantic or calm. It was a collection of voices all jumbled together, like fragments of words stolen from a thousand people all intersecting and overlapping. It buzzed in his back teeth. "Her name is Kimberly Archer. She's afraid, but unharmed. Something's odd, though. She doesn't remember her husband, or their child."
"Is she safe?"
"They've got her sedated. I'm worried for her. The poor woman's getting pulled back and forth like-"
"Is she safe?"
The voice rose in pitch, the buzzing suddenly furious, like a swarm of locusts inside Goodwell's head. "She's safe," he whispered.
"Watch her. She will be vital."
"Hey, I've got a lot of responsibilities. You know two more kids went missing this week? And the fires, and the blister-sickness-"
"Watch her." The voice faded like it was being drawn down a long hallway, into the dark. The candles shuddered, then stilled.
Goodwell stood slowly. His knees ached, and the blood in the bowl had cooked into a hard black patina.
Hannah would clean it out. She always did.
* * *
The problem with the blister patients wasn't their demands for pain meds (which were never ending, and punctuated by screams) or their bulging, pus-filled skin (which was the most heinous thing Bo Tuscon had seen in his eight years of nursing). It was the smell. When a patient scratched themselves or rolled over on their sores and burst one of those yellow-black blisters, the stink of the fluid inside made him gag.
Worst of all was when they leaked on his hands. He always wore gloves, but even so, he swore he could feel that pus eating through the latex. He scrubbed with soap but the smell remained, etched into his skin for hours afterward.
So when Arthur Friedman - fifty-two years old, left leg amputee, currently bedridden with the skin condition dubbed the blister sickness - called for Bo at three minutes to midnight, Bo ignored him. He stood outside the doorway and watched Arthur thrash in the dark, tangling himself in the bedsheets. He knew he should feel guilty, but there was nothing inside him but the exhaustion that followed a week of fifteen hour shifts.
Nine am to midnight, Monday to Friday. Lunch breaks optional. He would've complained to a supervisor, but everyone at St Jeremiah's was pulling the same hours. Too many sick and not enough staff. Harden up or quit.
Bo watched the minute hand on his Seiko tick around until it hit twelve. Inside the darkened room, Arthur Friedman rolled over, exposing his bare back. The skin was bloated, lumps like ping-pong balls rising over his shoulder blades. Soon they'd spread to his face, his tongue, his throat.
Too bad for Arthur. It was midnight, and Bo was punching out.
Jacinta May was one of two nurses pulling the graveyard shift. She waved to Bo as he marked his hours and hung up his scrubs. Jacinta was a whip-thin brunette with legs up to the ceiling and an accent Bo couldn't quite place. Smart as hell, which scared him a little. Cute girls, he could deal with. Not cute girls who were also walking medical encyclopaedias. Jacinta made him feel small.
"Heard there's a bear out there," Jacinta advised, not pausing for a moment as she filled out the night-shift ledger. "Got a cave somewhere down the hill. Hope you don't have any honey sandwiches in the car."
"I'll just throw my pic-a-nic basket out the window," Bo scowled.
"What crawled up your ass? Come on, tell Auntie Jacinta."
"Oh, you
know. Never get a chance to breathe around here. Three more blisters turned up tonight, that specialist from Jersey still hasn't arrived, and we're running out of beds. And the crazy upstairs-"
"The job is the job, Bo. You don't like it, go teach or make shoes or something."
"That's not what I'm saying. I just want a break."
Jacinta looked thoughtful, pen clenched between her teeth. "You're right, you know."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. That specialist was supposed to be here a week ago. I'll ask Doctor Keller about it." She smiled. That was another thing Bo couldn't deal with. Girls with killer smiles."Anyway. Get out of here before you fall asleep. You've got two days off, right?"
"That's the rotation." Bo stuffed his hands in his pockets, his palms suddenly slick with sweat. "Jacinta..."
"What?"
"Well, our rotation kinda matches up, so I was thinking..."
The pen wobbled between her teeth. "Do tell?"
Bo's tongue froze in his mouth. "It's no big deal. See you when I see you."
"One of these days, Bo." Jacinta wiped her pen on her sleeve and returned to her forms. "Drive safe."
Outside, the rain was coming down hard. Bo sprinted for his car with water running into his eyes and soaking into his shirt, gluing it to his sweaty back. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen clear skies over the town. Seemed that even the sun knew to stay away. He blamed the rain for the late nights. Always people slipping and breaking their legs in Rustwood. Always someone ready to take a corner too fast and send their truck over an embankment.
It could've been worse. Hell, when the summer funfair opened in April and the beer-stalls started selling their fifty-cent cups he expected he'd be stitching foreheads and taping up split knuckles until three am every night. Something about that funfair always got men fighting. Women too, schoolteachers and traffic cops and once even a sewage worker who stopped by the fair for a turn on the ferris wheel and got her teeth knocked out by some bimbo who'd accused her of, as she put it, eye-fucking her boyfriend.
Yeah, April through August were the hard months. Hot, wet, and angry.
His battered old Ford only started on the third turn of the key, and he spluttered out of the lot on to O'Malley Drive, following the curve of the hillside down towards Rustwood Heights. St Jeremiah's had been built at the very peak of Worthington Hill as a monument to the industry of the town, and while Bo had to admit it cut a pretty striking silhouette against the night sky, it was hell on his gearbox.
O'Malley Drive wound through thick woodland, switching back upon itself as it stitched a path down the slope. The road was pitted and rotten, macadam sliding away as the soil eroded in the constant rain, but Bo knew every pothole. His tyres, however bald, didn't slip on the slick gravel. He gripped the wheel like a life preserver. His wipers ticked back and forth, a metronome across his vision. The drizzle had thickened to a hard patter on the windshield, enough to blur his view of the road into a smear of reflected headlights.
He thought of the crazy they'd admitted that afternoon. A woman with no memory. Or, to be more accurate, the wrong memories. A fugue state, perhaps. Or maybe an invention to help her cope with the sleepless nights that accompanied a newborn. Doctor Keller had mentioned post-partum depression. Not an area Bo had much experience in, but he supposed Keller knew best. Valium, a hot meal and a week away from the family, that was Bo's prescription.
The cold was making his hands shake. He cranked the heater and punched in an old Beach Boys tape, singing along as Brian Wilson crooned in crackly mono. "Oh, wouldn't it be nice," he whispered, taking another corner, headlights playing over firs, the centuries-old trees leaning over the road like silent sentinels. "Oh, wouldn't it be-"
The sedan came from nowhere. One moment the road ahead was clear - no cars, no deer, not even roadkill - and then it was a bare few yards away and still accelerating, headlights huge and bright, like driving into twin suns. Even through the rain-smeared windshield he could see there was no driver.
He jerked the wheel left and pumped the brakes, but it was far too late. The wheels locked, and Bo's little car slid sideways across the road.
The oncoming headlights filled his world. All he could see was white.
Then the crunch, the explosion of steel meeting steel. Bo was snapped right, his belt crushing his ribcage. His teeth clicked on his tongue. His head snapped back and forth on his neck so hard that fireworks popped behind his eyes.
The car tilted. Rubber squealed against macadam. Then it settled, rocking on its suspension, and everything was still.
Bo blinked. His hands were still locked on the wheel at ten and two. He tasted blood and his neck ached but he was alive.
His first thought was, I never paid my insurance. His second thought was, the driver!
His hands were shaking so badly that it took three tries to unbuckle his belt. The passenger door was caved in but the driver's door opened smoothly, and he tumbled out into the rain.
The water was a cold shock down his spine that jolted him upright. The other car was butted up against his, half-buried in his passenger-side door. He staggered to the driver's door and yanked it open, hoping he'd been wrong, that there was a driver, that he hadn't been hallucinating - or worse, that some kid had stolen his father's car, a kid too short to be seen over the dash.
The seat was empty. He touched the vinyl with one shaking hand. It was ice. Nobody was hiding in the back seats. No keys dangled in the ignition.
He shouted, "Hello?" into the darkness. Nobody replied.
The hood of the strange sedan had buckled in the crash and when Bo slipped one hand inside he found the engine cold, as if the car hadn't been moving at all. As if it'd been waiting for him.
Bullshit.
The rain battered down on the back of Bo's neck and ran over his lips as he returned to his own car and tried to start the engine. It spluttered but refused to catch. "Mother Mary, don't fail me now," he whispered, pumping the pedal and trying again. This time the engine made a low grinding sound before seizing and dying.
Okay, he thought. Take stock. The engine was dead and he didn't have a car phone but the hospital was only two miles back, three at the most. An hour walking uphill in the rain was better than three hours walking down to the outskirts of Rustwood, and the break room had sofas large enough to stretch out on. Better that than curling up in the car and waiting for dawn.
Besides, he didn't think he could sleep with that sedan so close. Just looking at it, looming beyond the passenger-side door, made his stomach clench into a tight, panicked knot. He was sure the lights had been on. No way had he driven into a car abandoned on the wrong side of the road. It'd been moving. Fast. He'd seen things before when running on so little sleep, hallucinated voices, dropped his sandwiches, been unable to grip doorknobs, but he'd never dreamed a parked car moving. Not with its lights on.
When he squinted he could just make out the faint glow of St Jeremiah's at the peak of the hill. The rain was only getting stronger.
He flipped his collar up around his ears and climbed out into the storm.
Bo was halfway up the hill, the lights of St Jeremiah's close enough that he could imagine their warmth. A mile, maybe less. A six minute jog on the flat, but the slope was steep and the rain was only getting stronger.
Then came the steady thud of feet on macadam.
The rain was coming down hard, heavy on his back and shoulders, stooping him. It was thick like honey, blinding, filling his nostrils. He gasped, spat, panted. The drumming of the rain on the road was so loud he couldn't hear his own breath, but still, he heard the dragging footsteps.
He sheltered beneath a leaning pine, slicking his hair back from his face. There was nothing on the road behind him. No other cars, no other people. He was alone on the blacktop. And yet, he swore he'd heard the shuffling gait of something in pursuit.
Bo remembered what Jacinta had said about bears, and shuddered. But there wasn't any point in standing around an
d waiting for the wildlife. He pushed on.
He was hungry, he was exhausted, but at least he wasn't sleepy. The rain had taken care of that. His socks squished between his toes with every step and his jacket was a dead weight. He'd have to borrow pajamas from the nurse's station. After that, a call to his Mom to beg for repair money, a massage to dispel the ache in his neck (he'd suffered whiplash before and knew the symptoms, and this wasn't quite whiplash, but no reason not to pay the local masseuse for a half hour of chop-socky), a trip to the laundromat, a tow-truck... His two free days were already falling apart.
A scrape echoed up the road. An ice finger ran down Bo's spine. Bears didn't scrape. They padded.
He pressed against the nearest tree, hugging it tight enough that the bark cut his chest. Two hundred yards below, at the point where the road switched back upon itself as it coiled down the mountainside, was a shadow that was neither tree nor rock. It moved like oil, shuddering, jerking in fits.
Bo's throat closed. He pressed back into the treeline, shoes slipping in the mud, letting the firs fold around him. Moonlight shone slick on the road. The sounds grew closer. A shuffle of feet. A dragging of flesh.
Not a bear, he thought. A wolf? Coyote? Some carrion-bird tapping along the highway, beaten to the ground by the rain? He cast around for a stick, a rock big enough to throw, but all he could find in the dark were hanks of pine needles and lumps of mulch. Through the gaps between the trees he could just make out the shadow approaching. It kept to the far side of the road, weaving drunkenly between the trees. He saw skinny legs, pale, jutting beneath a dirty summer dress.
The relief was a cold wash down his spine. The homeless around Saint Jeremiah's had never caused problems. Sometimes they sat in the waiting room on cold nights, clustering around the heating vents. They mumbled and swore but they didn't fight. He knew their names: Amanda Greensmith, Joe Trout, Paolo Rufio, the nameless man and woman who always huddled together and called themselves the King and Queen of the Highways...
Rust: One Page 2
