"Actually, I can. On your way here, you saw a stag."
Matt's smirk faded. "What did you say?"
"I said you saw a stag. And you did, didn't you?"
"How . . ." Matt swallowed. "How did you know?"
"Because the hero always sees a stag at the beginning. That's how these stories begin."
Matt felt lightheaded. "A lucky guess. These woods are full of deer."
Dindren nodded. "Of course they are. Believe what you want. Just be sure—when the next opportunity arises—to ask the right question." His bloody eye narrowed. "You will not get a second chance."
Click.
"What the—what the hell is going on here?"
Matt spun around. Hirotachi was standing in the doorway, holding a tray of meds.
"Uh, hi." Matt stood, pointed to the mop leaning against the wall. "I'm the swing? Just thought I'd clean up a little . . ."
"Swing? You're no fucking swing. You're that asshole who lied about Maloria's flat tire!"
"You're right. Shall we dance?" In a heartbeat, Matt had crossed the floor to her, grabbed her by her wrist, and flung her deep into the room, where she flopped, squawking, onto the mattress. To Dindren: "Time to hit the road, Doc."
"I completely concur."
They quickly stepped out of the room, and Dindren flipped the latch that locked the door. "She'll hit the 'call' button," he said worriedly.
And she did. But by the time they reached the front desk, it was unoccupied, and the red flashing light and accompanying buzz went unattended. Through the window of the break room door, Matt could see the backs of two aides watching a TV that showed Sasha Grey sucking on some guy's left nut.
"Looks like Hirotachi's in for a long night," Matt said.
"Not as long as Sasha's."
CHAPTER SIX
Together they blew out the door, into the darkness. Matt led Dindren back to the Admin Building.
"Must we?" the doctor asked, stopping short of the door.
"My rucksack's in the Control Room. Won't take a minute."
Dindren, shivering, stepped back into the shadows. "I'll wait for you here, then."
"Suit yourself."
Matt went through the kitchen (nine roaches, half the knives gone, weird cuffs still there) and down the hall, back to the Control Room. The smell of old meat in there was worse. It burned in his nostrils and made his heart beat faster. Time to get gone, he thought as he pulled his bag from the closet—and noticed immediately that it had been opened in his absence.
He crouched, looked through it quickly. He was missing some cash, a Leatherman knife, and his disposable cell phone.
Wonderful.
Matt ripped the zipper shut and was about to leave when he saw a flash of movement.
He turned, his chest tight.
Let out a breath. It was just one of the monitors, the one showing the front entryway to the Admin Building. The door had opened, and several employees were walking in for the shift change.
He looked at his watch, forcing his mind to focus. 11:02 p.m. He was officially noncompliant with Maloria's warning to be gone before the night shift.
Ah, well. As long as he had his uniform and mop, they wouldn't know any better than day shift had that . . . that . . .
Matt stopped breathing.
Leaned close to the monitor, eyes wide.
"Oh . . . crap."
The front entryway had filled with eight or nine men. They crowded around the front desk, signing in on the clipboard. The were big guys, bull necked, muscle-bound. A different breed from second shift. But that wasn't what made his breath catch in his throat.
It was their faces.
The grainy display may have had shit resolution, but it was still clear enough that he could see the dead flesh scrolling off the cheeks of the first aide to strut from the desk to the back hallway. And the second had a jagged hole where his nose should have been. The third had corroded skin hanging in tatters from his lower jaw. The fourth had no lower jaw. The fifth was awful. The sixth was worse. The seventh was indescribable.
"Fuck me."
Every single member of the night shift showed a hefty helping of Mr. Dark's rotting touch.
What had Maloria said?
Them fucked-up niggahs workin' midnights? They don't play.
He believed it.
And he believed he had to get out. Now.
Palms sweating, Matt hefted his rucksack, slung it over his shoulder, and spun around right into Darak's fist.
"Jesus." Matt staggered back into the console, clutching his eye.
"Think that was funny, motherfucker? Sendin' me all over the fuckin' place?" Darak, a black blur in his Wu-Tang outfit and dollar-sign do-rag, closed in quickly, using a bowlegged karate stance. "How funny you gonna find this?" He swiveled backward, and Matt ducked just in time to avoid having his head taken off by a completely respectable roundhouse kick. He could feel the wind of it ruffle his hair as it flew past.
Matt wasn't in the mood for a cage match, so he tried to shove past Darak and bolt for the door.
He almost made it. Almost.
Instead, Darak grabbed him by the collar from behind, said, "Oh, no you don't, bitch," and flung him into the "Treatment Plans / Overflow" file cabinet.
The back of Matt's head hit the metal cabinet with a hollow boom. He hit so hard that when he bounced off, the metal drawer slid out on its rollers.
"Guess you felt that," Darak laughed, closing in again in a low crouch as Matt backed up, head ringing, his shoulder brushing the open metal drawer. "And I got more where that came from. Guess you didn't know I'm a black belt, huh? Well, I am." Darak gripped the lip of the open metal drawer, leveraging himself for another kick. "Pay attention, bitch: I'm about to demonstrate the Flying Dragon, which goes a little like—AAAH!"
His threat morphed into a high-pitched scream as Matt shouldered the metal drawer closed on his hand. Darak spun around towards the cabinet, trying to pry his hand free, and that's when Matt punched him in the side of the neck. Darak gagged. Matt grabbed the back of his head and drove his face into the file cabinet. When he rebounded with a wail, Matt used his momentum to swing him by the hair across the small space, trip him with an outstretched leg, and drive his fall into the surveillance console.
Darak crashed into the low steel shelf with a deep groan. He slid to his knees, leaving a trail of blood across the control panel.
Matt grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him to his feet. He was about to reintroduce Darak's face to the console when a blur of movement caught his eye.
Shit, he thought. What now?
It was the monitor showing the hallway to the women's dorm in Module One. The grainy, black-and-white relay from the security camera showed two male aides dragging a young girl out of the women's dorm. He recognized her: it was Annica, the not-so-telekinetic blonde with the smeared makeup. She was fighting their grip, but it was no use. Together they dragged her across the hall and into the women's washroom. A third aide sauntered behind them casually, and then stood in the open doorway, arms crossed, on guard.
"Goddammit." Matt dragged Darak over to the closet. Darak's eyes rolled his way, and he made a feeble attempt to claw Matt's face. Matt rewarded his efforts with a brief but meaningful head butt, then said, "Pay attention, Darak: I'm about to demonstrate the Flying Foot, which goes a little like this." He buried his steel-toed Carhartt in Darak's crotch and shoved him into the closet.
"Namaste," he said, "you fuckhead."
CHAPTER SEVEN
"About time," Dindren hissed as Matt came barreling out of Admin. "What'd you do in there, take a nap? I think I may have caught hypothermia standing out here in the— Hey, where are you going?"
"Module One," Matt said. "Girl needs help."
"Well, this girl isn't going into any modules," Dindren panted, struggling to keep up. "The night shift is here. I'm making for the meditation path. It leads into the amphitheater in the woods, and away from this hellhole. If you hav
e any sense, you'll do the same."
"Meet you there in three minutes," Matt said, running up the steps to Module One.
"I doubt it," Dindren said, his voice rising with a wild elation as he ran for the foggy shadows at the end of the quad, his pink, daisy-print scrubs flapping behind him, "but thanks anyway. And remember: ask the question, or forever hold your peace!"
# # # # # #
Matt let himself into Module One, forced himself to slow down, and cautiously crossed the entryway to the common room. No aides. The TV was blaring a nasty Adult Swim cartoon, which was being watched by two slack-jawed male residents that Matt had never seen before. The guy who had drawn a maze on the wall earlier was still there, only now he was kneeling in front of it, banging his forehead into the center of the design again and again, making a mewing sound. No sign of the huge Ojibwe with the flame tattoos. On the table he'd been standing on were an empty pizza box and a spilled bottle of meds.
Nice.
Over the blare of the TV Matt heard a muffled shriek, and then another. They came from the hall leading to the women's dorm. He crossed the common room quickly, unnoticed, grabbing the mop Maloria had left behind that afternoon.
A few seconds later he was walking down the dimly lit linoleum corridor he'd seen on the Control Room monitor. As he got closer, he saw that the third aide was still standing in the washroom entryway, but instead of watching the hallway, he had turned inward to check out the action.
"That's it," he laughed as the girl's shrieks rose in pitch, "take that shit off."
Matt came behind him, moving fast. He knew he couldn't waste much time with the lookout, so he restricted himself to kicking him as hard as he could in the side of his knee. The guy went down like a bag of sand. A loud bag of sand.
His yell of pain was lost in the TV's blare as Matt entered the women's bathroom. It had a tiled shower area and five open stalls, one of which had a toilet with a nasty overflow problem. The other two aides had dragged Annica into the communal shower area, under a sputtering spigot. Her torn-off T-shirt lay on the floor. The only things she still had on were a pink sports bra and flannel pajama bottoms, and those were half off. An aide who looked like a plus-size Captain Morgan—complete with piratical goatee and gold earring—had her wrists pinned to the tile wall, while his weaselly pal gripped her raised ankle with one hand while the other pried her pajama pants down to midthigh, revealing star-spangled boy shorts beneath.
She was hysterical. Captain Morgan was alternately shushing her and laughing, and Weasel was saying, "It's all good, girl, it's all good." Matt saw that if he took them both on at once, she might get hurt—and he might not do so great, either.
So he didn't attack.
Instead, on impulse, he walked over to the stall with the backed-up toilet and began mopping up floaters. Whistling as he did.
"What . . ." The commotion let up a little. "Who the—who the fuck is that? See who the fuck that is!"
Matt kept mopping.
"Hey! Hey!"
Matt looked up. Weasel was standing in the stall entryway, his hands on either wall, glaring. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"This." Matt swung the mop so that a brown arc of crap splattered Weasel square in the face. After a split second of shocked silence, Weasel let out a strangled wail of disbelief and flattened his palms against his eyes. Which was a huge mistake, because it let Matt ram almost the entire mop head into his mouth and drive him across the room and into the hard tile wall with a satisfying ka-thunk.
"Oh, you fucker, it is so on," yelled Captain Morgan behind him. Matt knew Captain Morgan was shoving the girl aside to charge him. He knew Captain was much bigger than Weasel, and that being wacked with a mop wouldn't mean much to him. So when he jerked the mop head out of Weasel's mouth, Matt made sure to shift his grip, raise the other end high, and bring it down on Weasel's head twice as hard as he really needed to.
With a great crack, the blow KO'd Weasel.
But more important, it split the mop handle.
Hearing Captain's roar behind him, Matt again adjusted his grip, pivoted, and gave a fast thrust—just as Captain crashed into him. The two hit the floor hard; Captain crushed the breath out of Matt, flattening him like a steamroller. Matt's ribs creaked; he groaned, twisted, and rolled the big man off him.
Matt staggered to his feet, gasping for breath, shaky, his chest aching. Whatever he's gonna do next, Matt thought, struggling to stay upright, I'm not ready for it.
But as it turned out, he was. Because Captain's next move was to stare stupidly at the jagged end of the mop handle that pinned his right hand to his chest like a 4-H blue ribbon.
The guy let out an astonished whoop, and then an even louder one, and on and on until pretty soon he sounded like a love-struck gibbon.
"I coulda handled that myself, you know."
Brushing himself off, Matt turned to face the blonde. She'd pulled her pajama bottoms up and had retrieved the torn wet top, which she clutched to her chest. Her kohl-smeared eyes were wide with fear and defiance.
"Right. Well, I appreciate you letting me have a piece of the action."
Annica bit her lip. "I do have psionic powers, you know. I do. I was just about to unleash them."
Sure, he thought, if by "psionic power" you mean bladder. But he didn't say it.
"Look," he said. "This is no place for you, okay? So I want you to follow me, real close." And with that, he stepped around the shish kebab that had been the Captain and walked past the flattened Weasel.
"Oh my God, he's got a knife!" the blonde cried.
In the entryway, Matt saw that the lookout was upright again, kneeling on his one good leg, dragging the damaged one behind him. He clutched a butterfly knife in his hand. His face was a mask of pain and fury.
"Stay behind me," he said to the girl. "C'mon. Here we go."
He walked to the entryway. He didn't even slow down when the lookout took a wild swipe: just raised his right boot, and when the knife stuck in the sole, he pinned it and the guy's hand to the floor. Pivoted, and drove the steel toe of his left boot into the lookout's good knee.
The guy's ACL, when it tore, sounded like stomped-on bubble wrap. He immediately flung himself to the floor, wailing and flipping like a holy roller.
"After you," he said politely, taking Annica's hand and guiding her past the wailing aide. Her hand was small and warm in his, and he held it tightly as he led her down the hall, through the common room, and out into the fog.
# # # # # #
Hooh—ooh, ooh—HOOH.
Hooh—ooh, ooh—HOOH.
"What's that?" Annica pressed close to him as they jogged across the quad's wet grass, heading for the dark line of trees at its north end.
"Just an owl. Don't be scared—everything'll be okay. We're gonna head out the back way, up the meditation path."
"I'm not scared," she said. "One of my wild talents is precognition. You ever heard of precognition? It means I can tell the future. And I can tell the meditation path will be totally deserted at this time of night. So, yeah: I'm fully aware that it's gonna be okay."
He looked down at her. She'd wept away most of the kohl, and without it she looked a lot younger than he'd thought. Fifteen, maybe? Fourteen?
"You believe me, right?" she asked.
"Of course," he lied.
But as the two of them tramped through the tall, wet grass, he wasn't at all sure that her confidence in him wasn't just as misplaced.
In the washroom he'd been possessed with a weird certainty: he had to come to her aid; there'd been no question in his mind about it, and once he'd committed to doing so, the solution to every problem after that had appeared to him clearly, larger than life, in three dimensions. It was like how George Brett described his tunnel vision during his hitting streak with the 1980 Kansas City Royals: every pitch looked like a beach ball rolling towards him in slow motion.
Matt wondered if his confidence in the washroom, his quick thinking, wer
e at all related to his accident. He'd been in a few bar fights in the past, mainly with drunks—some friends, some not—who'd been too dumb to know when to quit, and he'd done okay. He'd even done some light boxing at the gym—just sparring, messing around. But he'd never felt so alive, so hyperaware, as in the moments after he'd seen the girl being dragged down the hall on the monitor. Maybe it's my function, he thought. What I'm meant to do. Why I came back.
Or not. Because out in the chilly, vaporous fog, his certainty, his confidence, was quickly ebbing away. Should they—like Dindren—escape through the meditation path, or double back to the parking lot, and so avoid the woods, but risk running into the night shift?
He didn't know. They were probably screwed either way.
Fuck it: head into the woods. Especially since, as they passed the Admin Building, he saw a dark shape in the FA's window, staring out at them. Matt stared back. Something was odd about the shape of its head. Wearing a hat? Who the hell knew. But it turned to watch them pass.
Not good.
"C'mon," he said, picking up the pace.
"Cold out here," she said, rubbing her arms as she ran. And then: "Where are you taking me?"
"Away."
Hooh—ooh, ooh—HOOH.
Hooh—ooh, ooh—HOOH.
# # # # # #
Soon enough they reached the flagstone path that led into the woods. There was a concrete birdbath on one side of the trail, and from it hung a poster-board sign, which said in puffy letters,
Carthage MHC Proudly Presents
Forest Friends:
Willy Willow and Betty Birch Meet the Head Tree!
Bottom of the Netflix queue for that one, Matt thought as he pulled the girl into the woods. The path grew soft with pine needles, and with less fog to reflect the light, it became darker. Here and there pale shrouds of moonlight shafted between the trunks, leaving jagged shadows on the forest floor.
"I think someone's following us," the girl said in a strangled voice.
Matt looked over his shoulder. For a split second he saw two coin-sized glimmers, like the reflecting eyes of a cat, then one, then none.
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